When did society decide to start messing with the clocks twice a year ?

Depends on which society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time...

When society became smarter

they told us we do it because little kids get hit by cars going to school in the dark

At one time there were different 12:00 noon in every city.  It as calculated by when the sun was directly atop the city hall, bell tower, clock tower, etc.  There are the same number of daylight hours before and after 12 noon.

The further north you go the more the seasonal variation between winter and summer.  On the shortest day of the year in Detroit, Dec 21, daylight is 9 hours. Sunrise is at 7:30 and sunset is at 4:30. Sound good, right?  Now in the middle of summer, the longest day is 15 hours.  Standard time would make sunrise at 4:30 am and sunset at 7:30. Since nobody is up at 4:30, it was a waste of daylight hours, so the clocks were adjusted to 5:30am sunrise and 8:30 sunset.  Instead of sleeping through the daylight, you were given more in the evening.

None of this even mattered back 200 years ago, because most people were farmers, and got up with the sun, so their internal clocks changed slowly throughout the year.  The only time they had to worry about the actual time would be when going to town for shopping or church.  Town clocks and church bells rang the time, so you knew how much time you had.

"While living in Paris, Ben Franklin was struck by how many hours of daylight were being wasted to sleep during the summer months. He wrote an open letter to a Parisian journal lamenting the wasted expenditures on candlewax, and presented his back-of-the-quillpad estimates of the cost savings if the entire population arose an hour or two earlier. However, Franklin did not specifically mention moving the clocks ahead; instead, he suggested official means for enforcement (rationing the sale of candlewax to families) and encouragement (ringing church bells at sunrise). The clock-shifting technique which we know and love was credited to the New Zealander George Vernon Hudson, who proposed it in 1895. DST was first widely adopted by warring countries during World War I as a way of conserving coal needed for military purposes. This launched a debate over DST's usefulness that continues to the present day (particularly by people stumbling about in their bathrooms). Of course, Franklin is also associated with other questionable ideas, including bifocals, lightning rods, electric current flowing from the positive to negative terminal, leaking official documents to fan opposition, and an independent United States of America."