Almost exactly a century ago, on 25 September 1926, Henry Ford instituted a policy of weekends for his workforce.
asserted
Ford → institute → workforce
Although various labor campaigns had existed for decades to try to carve out what we now call the weekend, this was the first widespread adoption.
asserted
this → exist → what
It caught on, buoyed by portraits of leisure gracing the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, drawn by an idealistic young artist from New York named Norman Rockwell.
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It → catch → York
In 1929, Walt Disney leveraged Saturday matinees of his animated films to launch The Mickey Mouse Club.
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Disney → leverage → Club
On Saturday 25 June 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, formalizing the weekend as federal policy.
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Roosevelt → pass → policy
Beyond workplace respite, the weekend began to form its own identity.
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weekend → begin → identity
In 1944, Frank Sinatra popularized Saturday as “the loneliest night of the week, because that’s the night my sweetie and I used to dance cheek-to-cheek”.
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sweetie → popularize → cheek
And the 1948 lyrics to Tennessee Saturday Night blared: “Civilized people live there alright, but they all go native on a Saturday night.”
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they → blare → night
The postwar boom of suburban pleasures transformed weekends into an anchor of indulgence.
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boom → transform → indulgence
And a banner year, 1969, saw the moon landing on a Sunday followed by a weekend of Woodstock.
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moon → see → Woodstock
All capped by the sloppy onslaught of brunch chaos.
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All → cap → chaos
Weekend vibes seemed unstoppable.
But it all began to come undone – not least thanks to an insidious boast from Jerry Reynolds, a guard-forward on Louisiana State University’s basketball team, printed in Sports Illustrated in November 1983; he is credited with coining the term “24/7”, describing his jump shot as reliable “24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year”.
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he → seem → hours
The phrase “24/7” epitomized a new flattening of time accelerated by CNN, which launched its 24-hour news network on 1 June 1980 (a Sunday, whereas MTV launched a year later on a Saturday).
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MTV → epitomize → Saturday
In 1985, “24/7” was popularized by People and soon after by the all-hours creep of cyberspace, pitched simultaneously as an “information superhighway”, “global village” and “digital town square”.
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24/7 → popularize → superhighway
In 2023, Pew found that married Americans had relatively unleisurely lives: 24.5 hours of leisure a week for those with children under 18 and 30.4 hours a week for those without.
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Americans → find → those
Divided over seven days, those tallies are grim to an extent insurmountable by even the most-bottomless mimosa.
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tallies → divide → mimosa
Thanks to the pandemic’s corporate encroachment of working from home and the atomized, optimized overcalculation of our schedules through digital calendars and presumptively social media, Saturdays now take up as much effort – planning, execution and stress – as any manic Monday.
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Saturdays → work → Monday
Nearly 20 years later, the 2009 concept of “Sunday scaries” now seems quaint; aren’t weekends scary enough?
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weekends → seem → scaries
The weekend was once the week’s well-earned dessert but its ice-cream has long been melted by the burdensome breach of busyness.
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cream → earn → busyness
The slop we now have can perhaps be refrozen, but it will never again be the confection of yesteryear.
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it → have → yesteryear
We have endured too much fracturing flux.
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We → endure → flux
Our lives are too fluxed-up.
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lives → flux → ?
Has 100 years of weekends worn out its welcome?
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years → wear → welcome
Weekends were built in part to bolster church attendance, but a 2024 Gallup survey found 56% of Americans attend religious services seldom or never.
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% → build → services
God can perform many miracles, but squeezing kindness and grace out of capitalism is not one of them.
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squeezing → perform → them
What we need is to abandon the weekend’s pretense of work-life boundary.
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need → need → boundary
That frontier has been hard-fought, sure, but so too has it been long breached.
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it → fight → ?
The battles have plainly favored labor over leisure.
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battles → favor → leisure
The only way to fight workweek creep on the weekend is with weekend creep in the workweek.
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way → fight → workweek
Bring pension thinking – the concept of employer gratitude for labor – to a 9-to-5 scale instead of a worklife that is, to quote the late Dolly Parton, “all taking and no giving”.
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that → bring → worklife
We need to give our weekend warrior selves presence at Monday morning meetings.
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We → need → meetings
Even by the US’s precarious standards, I live without a safety net.
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I → live → net
I am writing this essay on vacation, splayed out in bed like a happy starfish, taking in the view of a moonlit seaside castle.
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I → write → castle
In April, 69% of Americans had the audacity to tell Gallup pollsters that they had six or more hours of free time “on weekdays or weekends or both”.
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they → have → weekdays
But I call [checks with editor] … malarkey.
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I → call → editor
For a people who act like they invented freedom, Americans have a radiant knack for making excuses about what they can’t do.
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they → act → what
At the top of that list is “I can’t find the time.”
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I → find → time
In fairness, that’s true.
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that → ’ → fairness
Americans cannot find the time to live the lives they want.
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they → find → lives
But that’s the best lesson learned from our construction of weekends: time is not found; it is made.
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it → ’ → weekends
…and 10 more, not listed.
The Aporia
