Also, the week itself as a 'hard' delineator of time also appears to be fairly recent:
> Henkin treats the seven-day week as a social and cultural institution, focusing primarily on the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike years, months, and days, which have astronomical foundations, the week is an entirely historical and social construct with no scientific basis. The study argues that the early American republic was an unusually week-oriented society, in part because American colonists abandoned most of the annual feast days common in Europe, leaving the weekly Sabbath as the primary calendrical anchor. The influence of Puritan settlers, who rejected the Church of England's abundance of saints' days as redolent of Catholicism, contributed to this dominical orientation. Through industrialization, urbanization, and mass education during the nineteenth century, weekly consciousness became increasingly entrenched in American life.
> He identifies several factors that strengthened Americans' associations between specific weekdays and particular activities. Weekly wage payments, which became more common during the antebellum period, tightened the relationship between money and time; workers paid on Saturdays often spent much of their earnings quickly, creating what one passage describes as a financial hourglass pattern across the week. Standardized housework routines assigned specific tasks to particular days, with Monday widely recognized as washing day. Common schools organized curricula around weekly schedules […]
While Christianity's seven day period would make you think it was 'obvious', it tended to be broken up in more Catholic cultures (i.e., not Protestant, perhaps more Puritan), and so was a bit of a 'softer' delineation:
In pre-industrial times a large portion of the population was agriculture, and you may go to church, but you still have to take care of animals and such even on the seventh day; it was only in a more 'mechanized culture' (e.g., with factories) that time itself could perhaps be treated more mechanically.
Christianity gets its seven day period from Judaism, and it may well hearken back to Babylonian astronomy (seven planets, including the sun (Sunday) and moon (Monday)). The Romans, on the other hand, had an eight-day week with market days every eighth day (ninth counting inclusively, hence their name nundinae). In the middle ages, market towns had market days on fixed days of the week, every week, providing a commercial rhythm that had to give some rise to weekly consciousness before the twentieth century.
while the seven day week is arbitrary, it is also worth noting that the French Revolution had experimented with a metric ten day week, which ended up being a total bust because laborers only got one week in ten of rest rather than one in seven.
That seems like an implementation issue rather than a systemic one.
There's no reason you couldn't do off 2 on 8 or off 3 on 7 or off 2 on 2 off on 2 off on 2 or off on 3 off on 2 off on 2 or off on 4 X2 or...just about anything...
We see this today where people's schedule's aren't really in sync with the week where they'll do 4 on 3 off or split days off or 21 on 7 off (regardless of days in the month).
There are also a few people who do 6 28 hour days in a week claiming that it boost productivity because their days are longer.
For the elders here, what are the actual ways to not live under the rule of an industrial clock?
I’m not talking about starting your own company get rich quick scheme or moving into the woods (unless..), but really, I don’t see many ways about it. You could move somewhere rural, lower expenses, but then you are socially isolated to an extent. So, move to where people are, oh but then the only way to support the lifestyle is a standard job with security. Having a family is a whole different requirement almost making it “irresponsible” to not have stable income, hence time restrictions. Then again there seem to be a small population of explorers who live radically different lives or simply try to enjoy their work or switch jobs. Really struggling with this question.
You'd have to go back nearly 2000 years, at the very least, to find a time when civilizations weren't living under the tyranny of time keeping devices. Here's a poem from 195AD Rome satirizing the tyranny of the sun dial: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days
Leaving civilization is probably your only option. Other than joining a handful of remote tribes, or living as a recluse, I don't think there's anyway to completely shield oneself from the tyranny.
> You could move somewhere rural, lower expenses, but then you are socially isolated to an extent.
I got more social interactions the first week I moved to my house built in the middle of nowhere eastern europe than in my 10 years in a western EU capital. Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones.
You do lose some convenience, but it's not as bad is it used to be, for exemple there is a 24/7 automated supermarket 10min from my middle of nowhere village, 5g everywhere, etc.
Interesting. Do you feel constrained at all? That does sound nice and much more peaceful. I think it’s hard to imagine the change when many have been sold the story of moving to the big city becoming successful, living an exciting life in your 20s, 30s.
It really depends on what you want from life. If you value gadgets, convenience, going for an impromptu beer with friends on a thursday evening then it's a net negative. If you value peace, space, slowing down, nature then it's very nice. Less pollution, less noise, etc. I couldn't afford to buy a two bedrooms flat where I lived, now I own a 3 floor house, a garden big enough to feed my family and neighbours during peak season, life is good, can't complain
> Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones.
My experience is that after a point it gets annoying, and then oppressive. The proximity in smaller communities can help when everything is right. Neighbours can check on you, bring your kids to school, this sort of things. But at some point personal issues arise, and then it’s impossible to get out of them. That’s how you end up with family feuds over centuries because at some point someone did not like someone else.
Also, it’s nice if you correspond to what the community expects. If you don’t and you don’t build your own niche very quickly you get typecast and then outcast. Humans can be vile and petty, even in small communities. It gets particularly hairy if your bully is somewhat popular locally. Ask me how I know.
Anyway, I much prefer larger communities. I can still make friends if I want to, and if we have a fight it’s not the end of the village.
>That’s how you end up with family feuds over centuries because at some point someone did not like someone else.
This is a take it or leave it issue that will come down to personal preference.
The small town mentality knows that this is a possibility, and give it due deference. This is why everyone smiles and nods at almost everyone, almost always. Never cut anyone off. Accept gifts graciously. Mow the elderly neighbors' lawn, put the neighbors' trash out and bring it in if they forget. Do not mention sports, politics, religion, or intimacy unless you are in familiar company, and certainly not if said familiar company holds opposing views.
It does make for a bit of stagnation in that new social trends will always be more slowly adopted, if at all, due to the desire not to offend.
Imagine driving for years on end without anyone ever cutting you off, and people letting you cut if you look to be in a hurry. People offering comfort when you look down. Relative strangers cooking for you when you're sick. All done because they know you to be the kind of person who'd do the same if the situation were flipped because you've shown yourself to be that kind of person.
It's great if you like it, but if it's not for you, it's definitely not for you.
Have a look at ERE. Don't get fooled by the snake oil sounding url. I ignored it for years because of that, but it's a sound framework to help you answer the question you are asking.
Don't live for the weekend. Why 2 out of 7 days when you have another 5. Don't put off til the weekend. Don't put off til annual vacation. Don't put off til retirement. Live life every day.
As for each day, organize around living your life. For me, that means working a schedule from the other coast so I sleep when my body craves it, and not fighting it to be productive when I simply am running on reserves
Many do, but there are also many unique solutions. Work part time. Home office. Live rural, but close to a railwail station that brings you to the city quickly. Limit your expenses, check what you really need. Do freelancing, where you often can decide when you will do the work, ..
Society and your past decisions will put you on rails. You can get off them, but there will be sacrifices.
I will always gladly post this. Not because I think it's good advice or because I think Ran is a person to emulate, but because I think it encourages one to think differently about life, wants, needs, and responsibilities.
Aren't these effectively the same thing? In order to get the benefits of living/working as a group/in a society, there needs to be common elements; aggregating by location/space and by time go hand in hand. If the farmers' market is in the park on Sundays, you can hardly expect to show up at a different time or place and still participate. Regularity, in time or place, is the most common and scalable way to coordinate. The way to avoid that is to remove the need to coordinate, but then, by definition, you are alone.
I didn’t consider that. What I maybe meant is feeling owned by time rather than existing in it. In the past time wasn’t even a concept really. You just went about your life, realized you changed and the sun moved, but nothing like we have now with days of the week, constantly knowing the minute of the day, calendars locking us in months ahead of a day arriving, etc. I believe community can definitely thrive without clocks, however I understand your point.
You know all that shit you feel compelled to buy? You know that house that's about 2000 to 3,000 square feet more than you need? And all that excess food you eat that turned you into a fat ass? That car you drive that is three feet too long and 15-50k more than you need to spend?
But yes, being anti consumerist, even to a mild extent, is "radical". In particular, alas, to the vast vast vast majority of mates
Oh it is, but the job won't be done until we have solidarity across sectors. I'm looking to shut services off if companies ask too much of their workers.
Interesting article. I never thought about how important it is not just how many days off you have, but also when exactly you have them. It's really bad when you have days off, but you can't see your family.
I actually like the concept of a four-day workweek. I wonder if it will ultimately prove successful, and if the whole world will adopt it?
My company picks up holiday policy from one of its dev center and applies to all other engineers who live in different cities. On my "vacation" I am the only one in myfamily who has day off; and when my kids have some holiday I have to work.
I remember seeing a calendar on my first school year, 1971 in Finland, that marked which Saturdays were school days and which were off. Around the same time, I saw a cartoon about the future labor congress, where a dissatisfied worker asks "Mr President, do we have to every Wednesday?"
> Union-shop steward, emerging from a meeting with management to face a group of workers: “Brothers, we’ve got it made. From now on, we will work only on Wednesdays.”
> Irritated voice from the crowd: “You mean EVERY Wednesday?”
I suspect it’s significantly older than that though.
it wasn't much more than 50 years ago before being able to go to the ER to be saved in an emergency in the us was a right without having to show proof of payment/insurance.
a lot of what we take for granted are very recent things.
The lack of understanding about the change in day-to-day life over the last 200 years is truly unfathomable - I fully do not understand it but the little that I appreciate is absurdly profound in the differences
It’s like we’re living on an entirely different planet than the people who existed prior to the industrial revolution
Bertrand Russell’s grandfather was alive during napoleon’s rule and he speaks about the difference between 1950 and 1900:
It once came up whether my grandmother went to music festivals in her youth. Of course not, she said, they hadn't been invented yet! They didn't have electronic music, because they didn't have electronics. And nobody was playing guitar on stage for 12 hours. You could hold a short small concert in a hall, but you couldn't hold a big rave.
I wonder if someday we’ll have a “monthend”, where most of society takes a whole week off at the end of a month. I think I’d like this better than a 4 day work week. People could come back truly rested.
With AI agents, I work less, not more. The difference is it's off the books. On paper I seem to work the same but not in practice. I've gone from 40 hour work weeks to maybe 2 or 3 hours a day pushing some prompts. Someday, it might be 2 or 3 hours a week.
Whenever I hear someone in a privileged job, such as a software engineer, complain about unions or collective bargaining or in fact any form of collectivism, I have to suppress my rage because every concession to the working class, such as weekends, safety standards, overtime pay, PTO, sick leave and so on was paid for in blood by your forebears.
The biggest changes came shortly after Henry Ford conceded the weekend when the ultra-wealthy wrecked the economy (ie the Great Depression) and FDR was elected and, despite being a capitalist, realized he needed to address the very real issues to stave off the perceived threat of Communism. That's where Social Security, the right to join a union and a bunch of other things came from. There was even an attempted coup by the wealthy to avoid all this (ie the Business Plot [1]).
After WW2, the US (in particular) saw this as an opportunity to claw back these concessions. The Soviet Union became the Great Enemy. Former Naxis were recruited to fight Communism, both inside and outside the US. NASA, the FBI, the CIA, NATO, etc all filled with former Nazis despite their "morale lapses" [2] under the Third Reich.
Domestically, we got the Red Scare and McCarthyism. This really went into overdrive in the 1980s when Baby Boomers, whose fears of crime were fuelled by intentional propaganda as well as CIA efforts such as the crack epidemic, voted for Reagan in record numbers. Reagan won 49 states in 1984 (all but Wyoming).
One of the things I respect about Mad Men is how it pointed to the rising cult around Ayn Rand in the 1960s [3]. The 1950s, that tends to be romanticizied by so many hyper-individualists and right-wingers, had a top marginal tax rate of 91% and the CEO to median pay gap hadn't exploded yet [4]. By the way, that idea that CEOs were underpaid came from the Patton studies at McKinsey in this time [5].
My point is that this hyper-individualism is entirely manufactured by decades of spending to undermine any form of collectivism. And as a privileged worker, you owe those less fortunate to you some form of solidarity.
Other things that are surprisingly less than 100 years old include electronic music, Germany, Croatia, capitalism, the end of slavery, worker's rights, fiat currency, central banks, stock markets as more than a niche thing, and so on.
While there was legal slavery in some countries well into the second half of the 20th century, capitalism and workers' rights movements are definitely older than 100 years.
Didn't the Dutch East India Company go public in 1602?
Also, in ancient Rome, coinage with Caesar's face on it was traded above its bullion value. They'd kill 1/10th of your population repeatedly until you agreed to this (such was the origins of the word "decimation"), and then they'd buy their dinner from you with caesar-face coin and move on to the next village tomorrow. Now that you have some caesar-face coin, you have some incentive to continue upholding its inflated value, and the tax collectors will show up later and re-apply threats of violence to ensure that you continue to do so. That sounds like fiat currency to me.
Also, the federal reserve was established in 1913.
Dude, I'm all for framing the status quo as mutable, but maybe do a bit of research.
>Also, in ancient Rome, coinage with Caesar's face on it was traded above its bullion value. They'd kill 1/10th of your population repeatedly until you agreed to this (such was the origins of the word "decimation")
Decimation has it's origin in a military punishment for insubordination or cowardice. Where did you get the fiat currency idea from?
I learned it in latin class. It looks like I may have gotten it a bit wrong.
It's not that they killed every tenth member of whatever village they were adding to the roman empire that day, but rather than they conscripted some of them as soldiers and then killed every tenth of those who didn't obey.
I think the currency point stands though: value the money our soldiers carry, tax collectors will be along for it shortly, welcome to the Roman Empire.
>I think the currency point stands though: value the money our soldiers carry, tax collectors will be along for it shortly, welcome to the Roman Empire.
Well OK but a decimation was no small thing, it was documented to have happened just a few times in Roman recorded history.
I'd hesitate to think they employed such measures just to push the ur-Euro, especially since it doesn't seem like it would be a very effective incentive compared to the utility of the currency itself.
"I fished for a few weeks and got these coins that last forever and are easy to carry and now I can buy a horse at the horse market!"
So the currency decimation thing smells like a myth/exaggeration to me, but I admit it's just a hunch.
Thank you for the submission. I have long wondered if in the old days we had weekend off, and did we just work continuously 365 days?
It is not that working 365 days is hard. It is the job in today's world are very different, Muti tasking, context switching and anything but simple even in the lowest rank.
This is mentally tiring and I have also wondered if it is a recent thing. My argument is that cutting cost over the past 20 - 30 years meant what used to be a 5 person's job is now a 1 to 2 person job.
On a farm there's always work, and most were farming or similar back then.
An old farmer I know let me in on his trick: don't work so hard. He said young and inexperienced folks would work way too hard, ie put in too much effort, and get exhausted quickly. Instead lower the effort so it's sustainable. Move slower, don't lift near your max and so on.
In the past, a professional job might mean extended periods of travel by rail etc with little work to do. A small acreage farmer has to wait for plants to grow.
The advent of factories with limitless and constant demand for labor is a new development of the industrial revolution.
That doesn't mean that there isn't any downtime though. Most activity would be confined to daylight hours if nothing else. You'd probably do less on rainy days, and avoid hard work during the peak heat hours in the summer.
Having to keep up social appearances within an accepted range and suppressing ideas and behavior that conflict with rules imposed by a religious organization does not sound relaxing to me like watching TV does. My white collar labor is less stressful to me than religious strictures would be.
If you enjoy learning about the history of labor and free time, I highly recommend the book Free Time by Gary Cross.
Also, the week itself as a 'hard' delineator of time also appears to be fairly recent:
> Henkin treats the seven-day week as a social and cultural institution, focusing primarily on the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike years, months, and days, which have astronomical foundations, the week is an entirely historical and social construct with no scientific basis. The study argues that the early American republic was an unusually week-oriented society, in part because American colonists abandoned most of the annual feast days common in Europe, leaving the weekly Sabbath as the primary calendrical anchor. The influence of Puritan settlers, who rejected the Church of England's abundance of saints' days as redolent of Catholicism, contributed to this dominical orientation. Through industrialization, urbanization, and mass education during the nineteenth century, weekly consciousness became increasingly entrenched in American life.
> He identifies several factors that strengthened Americans' associations between specific weekdays and particular activities. Weekly wage payments, which became more common during the antebellum period, tightened the relationship between money and time; workers paid on Saturdays often spent much of their earnings quickly, creating what one passage describes as a financial hourglass pattern across the week. Standardized housework routines assigned specific tasks to particular days, with Monday widely recognized as washing day. Common schools organized curricula around weekly schedules […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Week:_A_History_of_the_Unn...
While Christianity's seven day period would make you think it was 'obvious', it tended to be broken up in more Catholic cultures (i.e., not Protestant, perhaps more Puritan), and so was a bit of a 'softer' delineation:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_day
In pre-industrial times a large portion of the population was agriculture, and you may go to church, but you still have to take care of animals and such even on the seventh day; it was only in a more 'mechanized culture' (e.g., with factories) that time itself could perhaps be treated more mechanically.
Also also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week
Christianity gets its seven day period from Judaism, and it may well hearken back to Babylonian astronomy (seven planets, including the sun (Sunday) and moon (Monday)). The Romans, on the other hand, had an eight-day week with market days every eighth day (ninth counting inclusively, hence their name nundinae). In the middle ages, market towns had market days on fixed days of the week, every week, providing a commercial rhythm that had to give some rise to weekly consciousness before the twentieth century.
while the seven day week is arbitrary, it is also worth noting that the French Revolution had experimented with a metric ten day week, which ended up being a total bust because laborers only got one week in ten of rest rather than one in seven.
That seems like an implementation issue rather than a systemic one.
There's no reason you couldn't do off 2 on 8 or off 3 on 7 or off 2 on 2 off on 2 off on 2 or off on 3 off on 2 off on 2 or off on 4 X2 or...just about anything...
We see this today where people's schedule's aren't really in sync with the week where they'll do 4 on 3 off or split days off or 21 on 7 off (regardless of days in the month).
There are also a few people who do 6 28 hour days in a week claiming that it boost productivity because their days are longer.
For the elders here, what are the actual ways to not live under the rule of an industrial clock?
I’m not talking about starting your own company get rich quick scheme or moving into the woods (unless..), but really, I don’t see many ways about it. You could move somewhere rural, lower expenses, but then you are socially isolated to an extent. So, move to where people are, oh but then the only way to support the lifestyle is a standard job with security. Having a family is a whole different requirement almost making it “irresponsible” to not have stable income, hence time restrictions. Then again there seem to be a small population of explorers who live radically different lives or simply try to enjoy their work or switch jobs. Really struggling with this question.
You'd have to go back nearly 2000 years, at the very least, to find a time when civilizations weren't living under the tyranny of time keeping devices. Here's a poem from 195AD Rome satirizing the tyranny of the sun dial: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days
Leaving civilization is probably your only option. Other than joining a handful of remote tribes, or living as a recluse, I don't think there's anyway to completely shield oneself from the tyranny.
> You could move somewhere rural, lower expenses, but then you are socially isolated to an extent.
I got more social interactions the first week I moved to my house built in the middle of nowhere eastern europe than in my 10 years in a western EU capital. Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones. You do lose some convenience, but it's not as bad is it used to be, for exemple there is a 24/7 automated supermarket 10min from my middle of nowhere village, 5g everywhere, etc.
Interesting. Do you feel constrained at all? That does sound nice and much more peaceful. I think it’s hard to imagine the change when many have been sold the story of moving to the big city becoming successful, living an exciting life in your 20s, 30s.
It really depends on what you want from life. If you value gadgets, convenience, going for an impromptu beer with friends on a thursday evening then it's a net negative. If you value peace, space, slowing down, nature then it's very nice. Less pollution, less noise, etc. I couldn't afford to buy a two bedrooms flat where I lived, now I own a 3 floor house, a garden big enough to feed my family and neighbours during peak season, life is good, can't complain
> Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones.
My experience is that after a point it gets annoying, and then oppressive. The proximity in smaller communities can help when everything is right. Neighbours can check on you, bring your kids to school, this sort of things. But at some point personal issues arise, and then it’s impossible to get out of them. That’s how you end up with family feuds over centuries because at some point someone did not like someone else.
Also, it’s nice if you correspond to what the community expects. If you don’t and you don’t build your own niche very quickly you get typecast and then outcast. Humans can be vile and petty, even in small communities. It gets particularly hairy if your bully is somewhat popular locally. Ask me how I know.
Anyway, I much prefer larger communities. I can still make friends if I want to, and if we have a fight it’s not the end of the village.
>That’s how you end up with family feuds over centuries because at some point someone did not like someone else.
This is a take it or leave it issue that will come down to personal preference.
The small town mentality knows that this is a possibility, and give it due deference. This is why everyone smiles and nods at almost everyone, almost always. Never cut anyone off. Accept gifts graciously. Mow the elderly neighbors' lawn, put the neighbors' trash out and bring it in if they forget. Do not mention sports, politics, religion, or intimacy unless you are in familiar company, and certainly not if said familiar company holds opposing views.
It does make for a bit of stagnation in that new social trends will always be more slowly adopted, if at all, due to the desire not to offend.
Imagine driving for years on end without anyone ever cutting you off, and people letting you cut if you look to be in a hurry. People offering comfort when you look down. Relative strangers cooking for you when you're sick. All done because they know you to be the kind of person who'd do the same if the situation were flipped because you've shown yourself to be that kind of person.
It's great if you like it, but if it's not for you, it's definitely not for you.
Have a look at ERE. Don't get fooled by the snake oil sounding url. I ignored it for years because of that, but it's a sound framework to help you answer the question you are asking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker
https://earlyretirementextreme.com/
Don't live for the weekend. Why 2 out of 7 days when you have another 5. Don't put off til the weekend. Don't put off til annual vacation. Don't put off til retirement. Live life every day.
As for each day, organize around living your life. For me, that means working a schedule from the other coast so I sleep when my body craves it, and not fighting it to be productive when I simply am running on reserves
It’s called society and it’s really hard to fight against. I’d suggest you look for a way to fit in that suits you.
Old guy checking in. This is the best reply I could find that matches my view.
You might not escape but you can breathe better air if you try.
Do you need a big house, do you need a shiny new vehicle, do you need to eat at restaurants twice a week?
Life can be more your way if you have more money to make it your way.
"Really struggling with this question."
Many do, but there are also many unique solutions. Work part time. Home office. Live rural, but close to a railwail station that brings you to the city quickly. Limit your expenses, check what you really need. Do freelancing, where you often can decide when you will do the work, ..
Society and your past decisions will put you on rails. You can get off them, but there will be sacrifices.
I will always gladly post this. Not because I think it's good advice or because I think Ran is a person to emulate, but because I think it encourages one to think differently about life, wants, needs, and responsibilities.
https://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html
Aren't these effectively the same thing? In order to get the benefits of living/working as a group/in a society, there needs to be common elements; aggregating by location/space and by time go hand in hand. If the farmers' market is in the park on Sundays, you can hardly expect to show up at a different time or place and still participate. Regularity, in time or place, is the most common and scalable way to coordinate. The way to avoid that is to remove the need to coordinate, but then, by definition, you are alone.
I didn’t consider that. What I maybe meant is feeling owned by time rather than existing in it. In the past time wasn’t even a concept really. You just went about your life, realized you changed and the sun moved, but nothing like we have now with days of the week, constantly knowing the minute of the day, calendars locking us in months ahead of a day arriving, etc. I believe community can definitely thrive without clocks, however I understand your point.
In a world with such strong async communication and logistics, surely this is less of a constraint than ever.
Sadly, as soon as you can conjure the concept of time and schedules, you will yourself end up under one, either self-imposed or imposed by others.
It will creep slowly on you and before you realize you will be late to do the laundry or whatnot.
Having a schedule and making so many things predictable and optimizable is just too advantageous to just not do it.
This can be done, and in major cities as well. You get a tent, and some fentanyl and just don't go to work anymore.
You know all that shit you feel compelled to buy? You know that house that's about 2000 to 3,000 square feet more than you need? And all that excess food you eat that turned you into a fat ass? That car you drive that is three feet too long and 15-50k more than you need to spend?
But yes, being anti consumerist, even to a mild extent, is "radical". In particular, alas, to the vast vast vast majority of mates
Let's celebrate its 100th birthday by moving labor day to Friday! Every Friday.
Oh is that not how you're living already?
Oh it is, but the job won't be done until we have solidarity across sectors. I'm looking to shut services off if companies ask too much of their workers.
Interesting article. I never thought about how important it is not just how many days off you have, but also when exactly you have them. It's really bad when you have days off, but you can't see your family. I actually like the concept of a four-day workweek. I wonder if it will ultimately prove successful, and if the whole world will adopt it?
My company picks up holiday policy from one of its dev center and applies to all other engineers who live in different cities. On my "vacation" I am the only one in myfamily who has day off; and when my kids have some holiday I have to work.
It is impossible to explain this to HR team. Sic.
I remember seeing a calendar on my first school year, 1971 in Finland, that marked which Saturdays were school days and which were off. Around the same time, I saw a cartoon about the future labor congress, where a dissatisfied worker asks "Mr President, do we have to every Wednesday?"
From 1965 issue of Time:
> Union-shop steward, emerging from a meeting with management to face a group of workers: “Brothers, we’ve got it made. From now on, we will work only on Wednesdays.”
> Irritated voice from the crowd: “You mean EVERY Wednesday?”
I suspect it’s significantly older than that though.
Can I have a 4 day work week?
A surprising amount of apparently long standing traditions are actually anglo-adjacent inventions from the last 150 years
it wasn't much more than 50 years ago before being able to go to the ER to be saved in an emergency in the us was a right without having to show proof of payment/insurance.
a lot of what we take for granted are very recent things.
The two-day weekend is a 100 years old.
The one-day weekend is ancient.
The lack of understanding about the change in day-to-day life over the last 200 years is truly unfathomable - I fully do not understand it but the little that I appreciate is absurdly profound in the differences
It’s like we’re living on an entirely different planet than the people who existed prior to the industrial revolution
Bertrand Russell’s grandfather was alive during napoleon’s rule and he speaks about the difference between 1950 and 1900:
https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA
It once came up whether my grandmother went to music festivals in her youth. Of course not, she said, they hadn't been invented yet! They didn't have electronic music, because they didn't have electronics. And nobody was playing guitar on stage for 12 hours. You could hold a short small concert in a hall, but you couldn't hold a big rave.
My mom was around when different races couldn’t use the same water fountain and women couldn’t have bank accounts.
I used to turn a wheel a bunch of times to call a friend.
Her grandkids have never known a world without fortnite on ipads and real life dick tracy watches.
It’s a weird world. Makes you wonder how things will look in thirty years.
“It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.”
That phrasing sounds a bit strong for temporary symptom relief.
Hence the dowager said "What's a weekend?"
It, like democracy and world trade, is probably a temporary blip.
Once the "elite"realize that drones, AI, and total information awareness provide the tools for complete totalitarian rule, we will pray for 1984
I wonder if someday we’ll have a “monthend”, where most of society takes a whole week off at the end of a month. I think I’d like this better than a 4 day work week. People could come back truly rested.
With the shift to AI, it could happen.
> With the shift to AI, it could happen.
You'll work more and they'll pocket the difference, as it's been the case for every advances in the last 50 years.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGj_oQ...
Do they?
With AI agents, I work less, not more. The difference is it's off the books. On paper I seem to work the same but not in practice. I've gone from 40 hour work weeks to maybe 2 or 3 hours a day pushing some prompts. Someday, it might be 2 or 3 hours a week.
That only works until they realize what's going on. Then you will be expected to output so much that you will have to prompt for 40 hours a week.
And work all 3 weeks?
Nah, I'll keep my Friday's off.
Your Fridays.
We could all work 5 day/2day off, 4 weeks, and whatever was left at the end of the month? Time off.
The variability would be fun. Sometimes it would be a 5 day weekend even.
Whenever I hear someone in a privileged job, such as a software engineer, complain about unions or collective bargaining or in fact any form of collectivism, I have to suppress my rage because every concession to the working class, such as weekends, safety standards, overtime pay, PTO, sick leave and so on was paid for in blood by your forebears.
The biggest changes came shortly after Henry Ford conceded the weekend when the ultra-wealthy wrecked the economy (ie the Great Depression) and FDR was elected and, despite being a capitalist, realized he needed to address the very real issues to stave off the perceived threat of Communism. That's where Social Security, the right to join a union and a bunch of other things came from. There was even an attempted coup by the wealthy to avoid all this (ie the Business Plot [1]).
After WW2, the US (in particular) saw this as an opportunity to claw back these concessions. The Soviet Union became the Great Enemy. Former Naxis were recruited to fight Communism, both inside and outside the US. NASA, the FBI, the CIA, NATO, etc all filled with former Nazis despite their "morale lapses" [2] under the Third Reich.
Domestically, we got the Red Scare and McCarthyism. This really went into overdrive in the 1980s when Baby Boomers, whose fears of crime were fuelled by intentional propaganda as well as CIA efforts such as the crack epidemic, voted for Reagan in record numbers. Reagan won 49 states in 1984 (all but Wyoming).
One of the things I respect about Mad Men is how it pointed to the rising cult around Ayn Rand in the 1960s [3]. The 1950s, that tends to be romanticizied by so many hyper-individualists and right-wingers, had a top marginal tax rate of 91% and the CEO to median pay gap hadn't exploded yet [4]. By the way, that idea that CEOs were underpaid came from the Patton studies at McKinsey in this time [5].
My point is that this hyper-individualism is entirely manufactured by decades of spending to undermine any form of collectivism. And as a privileged worker, you owe those less fortunate to you some form of solidarity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/10/28/during-cold-war-cia-fbi-...
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKX8C6qKuac
[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1na8fww/the_typical...
[5]: https://ritholtz.com/2013/08/is-mckinsey-to-blame-for-skyroc...
> Wyoming
Minnesota
No, he's 36. /s
Other things that are surprisingly less than 100 years old include electronic music, Germany, Croatia, capitalism, the end of slavery, worker's rights, fiat currency, central banks, stock markets as more than a niche thing, and so on.
> Germany
The HRE for several hundred years could probably seen as a proto-Germany.
What year do you think it is
2026
While there was legal slavery in some countries well into the second half of the 20th century, capitalism and workers' rights movements are definitely older than 100 years.
Didn't the Dutch East India Company go public in 1602?
Also, in ancient Rome, coinage with Caesar's face on it was traded above its bullion value. They'd kill 1/10th of your population repeatedly until you agreed to this (such was the origins of the word "decimation"), and then they'd buy their dinner from you with caesar-face coin and move on to the next village tomorrow. Now that you have some caesar-face coin, you have some incentive to continue upholding its inflated value, and the tax collectors will show up later and re-apply threats of violence to ensure that you continue to do so. That sounds like fiat currency to me.
Also, the federal reserve was established in 1913.
Dude, I'm all for framing the status quo as mutable, but maybe do a bit of research.
>Also, in ancient Rome, coinage with Caesar's face on it was traded above its bullion value. They'd kill 1/10th of your population repeatedly until you agreed to this (such was the origins of the word "decimation")
Decimation has it's origin in a military punishment for insubordination or cowardice. Where did you get the fiat currency idea from?
I learned it in latin class. It looks like I may have gotten it a bit wrong.
It's not that they killed every tenth member of whatever village they were adding to the roman empire that day, but rather than they conscripted some of them as soldiers and then killed every tenth of those who didn't obey.
I think the currency point stands though: value the money our soldiers carry, tax collectors will be along for it shortly, welcome to the Roman Empire.
>I think the currency point stands though: value the money our soldiers carry, tax collectors will be along for it shortly, welcome to the Roman Empire.
Well OK but a decimation was no small thing, it was documented to have happened just a few times in Roman recorded history.
I'd hesitate to think they employed such measures just to push the ur-Euro, especially since it doesn't seem like it would be a very effective incentive compared to the utility of the currency itself.
"I fished for a few weeks and got these coins that last forever and are easy to carry and now I can buy a horse at the horse market!"
So the currency decimation thing smells like a myth/exaggeration to me, but I admit it's just a hunch.
does the guardian ever actually write anything worth reading?
Thank you for the submission. I have long wondered if in the old days we had weekend off, and did we just work continuously 365 days?
It is not that working 365 days is hard. It is the job in today's world are very different, Muti tasking, context switching and anything but simple even in the lowest rank.
This is mentally tiring and I have also wondered if it is a recent thing. My argument is that cutting cost over the past 20 - 30 years meant what used to be a 5 person's job is now a 1 to 2 person job.
On a farm there's always work, and most were farming or similar back then.
An old farmer I know let me in on his trick: don't work so hard. He said young and inexperienced folks would work way too hard, ie put in too much effort, and get exhausted quickly. Instead lower the effort so it's sustainable. Move slower, don't lift near your max and so on.
In the past, a professional job might mean extended periods of travel by rail etc with little work to do. A small acreage farmer has to wait for plants to grow.
The advent of factories with limitless and constant demand for labor is a new development of the industrial revolution.
Even on a small farm there is always work to do.
That doesn't mean that there isn't any downtime though. Most activity would be confined to daylight hours if nothing else. You'd probably do less on rainy days, and avoid hard work during the peak heat hours in the summer.
Jewish, Christian, and Islam have a Sabbath.
Not sure what anyone else did.
Lots of holidays, especially in places with multiple calendars (lunar/solar/etc).
> Lots of holidays, especially in places with multiple calendars (lunar/solar/etc).
And in Catholic cultures (historically):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_day
The English word "holiday" comes from "holy day" after all.
Because Moses asked Pharaoh for a day off and Pharaoh said no, get back to work.
Not really a day of rest since you have to go to <place of worship>
Considering what work looked like in even the 18th century it was indeed rest in comparison.
Going to church is equivalent to watching tv, its not work.
Having to keep up social appearances within an accepted range and suppressing ideas and behavior that conflict with rules imposed by a religious organization does not sound relaxing to me like watching TV does. My white collar labor is less stressful to me than religious strictures would be.
People didn’t have much more to do back then. There was no TV.