Are Weekends Obsolete?

“The weekend mindset is an invention overdue for radical reinvention,” writes freelancer and Zoom jockey Richard Morgan.

Most people’s Saturdays, it seems, are as busy as any weekday, while Sundays are no longer sacrosanct.

The weekend was once the week’s well-earned dessert but its ice-cream has long been melted by the burdensome breach of busyness. The slop we now have can perhaps be refrozen, but it will never again be the confection of yesteryear.

Besides, if we’re gradually learning to escape work, the weekend doesn’t make much sense anymore:

Weekends were built for factory labor, not Zoom meetings. The global rise of four-day workweeks show how arbitrary our current set-up is. Why not two-day workweeks if the work can still be done?

Sabbaths began as days of rest. That antiquated thinking dangerously frames such rest in service of labour. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I think God wants more for me than the life of a dishrag whose only peace is on the drying rack in between meals.

So what to do? One way or another:

Make time for yourself. For your loved ones. For your hobbies. For your ambitions. For your booty calls. For your bubble baths. For sushi. For tennis. For tattoos. For book club. For therapy. For karaoke. For leg day. For Lego. For mahjong. For your journal. For your marathon. For your second helping of cheesecake and your umpteenth viewing of The Golden Girls. For Final Fantasy Resonance or Grand Theft Auto VI – or both. For that trip to Japan. For that colonoscopy. For whatever you want whenever you want – because nobody, absolutely nobody, logs their achievements or fond memories in categorization by days of the week. We cannot list the top five Wednesdays of our lives.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.