Le Weekend
When I was in high school I learned that in France they had adopted the English word weekend into their language and culture, which had not previously existed (and therefore had not single word to represent). This became Le Weekend. It seems the concept has more going on with it than I had realized. The designation of years, months and days connect to cyclicality of the heavens. Solar orbits, lunar cycles and terrestrial orbits call the ball (somewhat adjusted to meet the feeble and ordered minds of humans). But the week and thus the weekend have no similar cyclical orientation. It seems to stem from Judaism and the need to observe the Sabbath though other cultures took breaks anywhere from six to eight days apart. For whatever reason and from wherever it derives (England seems to be the commonly held source due to it early industrialization and the need to arbitrarily set work schedules to meet factory needs), the weekend is the period of rest at the end of a work week.
Global convention is more or less standardized now on two days of rest for every five days of work. Most often we know Le Weekend as Saturday and Sunday (covering the Jewish and Christian days of worship), but in the Muslim world it is something more aligned with Friday and Saturday to fit their worship schedule. It’s harder still to understand whether the world has defaulted to this 2/7 ratio for rest and leisure for physiological reasons or simply because our developed productivity level suggests that we do not need to work more than that to survive. I remember my economic anthropology course where people in India, where a western factory had suddenly gotten built in their town. They were able to make twice what they had in their prior subsistence activities. It was vexing to the company that many of the workers would leave for lunch and then not return for the afternoon’s work. Research showed that they worked only as long as they needed to survive at their prior economic level. In anthropological terms that is defined as having limited wants. These people would have opted for a four-day weekend.
In this day and age of the information economy and digital connectivity, the work cycle is vastly different than the days of the factory floor. Obviously, work location and remote working is one big issue. We have all been on flights with flight attendants that fly the New York to Paris route, but live in Minneapolis and just commute for free by plane as needed to work their two weekly flights and then spend the rest of their week at home. We also know that more and more people opt to work one or two days remotely, relying on email and phone to remain productive. If you work from home three days a week, is a Saturday and Sunday as special as it is to the person who punches the clock from 9-to-5 from Monday to Friday?
I often suggest that the same thought process applies to retirement. If you are a person on the clock, retiring may be a necessary step due to weariness and physical tiredness. Information workers and especially those who can and do work from home may not need retirement so much. In fact, they may find value (not just pecuniary) in having something to partially fill up their time with productive activity, especially if it is low-stress activity since presumably they are quite expert at their jobs at that stage.
An acquaintance of mine has reached the age of retirement and has throttled back to working three days a week. He has a technical client service job and rarely works form anywhere other than home. This has been the case for several years and is broken only by occasional office visits and client visits. When I questioned him about the arrangement he was somewhat belligerent towards his employer, adopting a take-it-or-leave-it attitude when I asked if they liked the arrangement. It struck me as funny because he said he didn’t mind his work at all and admitted that he did not have enough other hobbies or desired activities (his wife was still bound to her work and the schedule that implied) to otherwise occupy himself. This told me that his need for rest, a break, retirement (whatever you want to call it) was mostly a psychological function rather than a physical one. He needed to move on and it would either be on his terms or not at all. He was a modern-day equivalent to that Indian peasant that would rather nap the afternoon away than to add to his bank account.
So, back to the weekend. The issue is about man’s psychological need for rest and recreation. I’ve always liked the word recreation or re-creation. Man must regularly re-create himself if he is to be truly productive. We have culturally invented Le Weekend to accomplish this. Truth be told, I spend my Saturday mornings preparing an update of the week to send to my colleagues. It never feels like “work” to me. It feels like a relief to unburden myself of all the weeks’ activities and resultant to-do’s. It is a process of re-creation. I then spend Sunday evening preparing myself for the upcoming week so that it can be optimally productive. So, my weekend is truly about re-creation for the work at hand. Don’t get me wrong, I do rest and relax more, but it’s not really about shutting down on work for two days. It is about refreshing myself so that I can do my work better both for the prior weeks’ efforts and the future weeks’ endeavors.
My last thought on weekends is that they provide the all-important “thing to look forward to”. I am a big believer that weekends and vacations are really more about the expectation than the reality. I always need something to look forward to. I know I am not alone as I have heard similar thoughts from others on this exact topic. I tend to plan vacations in advance for this exact reason. It may be a bit about OCD tendencies about planning, but I like to think it is more about wanting to have a stake in the ground to strive towards. A weekend may not be a big event in people’s lives, but if we get past Wednesday (hump day) and all the way to Friday (TGIF), we feel like we have earned our weekend.
Dear Lone Ranger,
Please excuse me if my thoughts and opinions wander off into total chaos and irrelevance. It’s just that I found out yesterday from our fearless leader telling me that I have autism due to the inoculations I had as a child. Damn Dr. Jonas Salk!! I guess our favorite President has never used ‘all his words’ to read much. The doctor who first proposed this connection is not thought of as a pioneer so much as a person who’s study has been deemed extremely flawed and therefore pretty much bogus. But the seed has been sown and many people these days want any excuse to blame someone or something for every impediment that comes their way. Do a little reading and see how many people were affected or died from diseases before vaccines were developed. I truly feel sorry for the one or two out of 100 who get the illness anyway but, not to seem callous, I feel the 10 or 15 who would have gotten it prior to these treatments is a pretty good trade up. Of course the legal practitioners who thrive on this junk science are thrilled. Two of my favorite authors are John Grisham and the late Michael Crichton. They aren’t Faulkner or Hemingway but I learned many things from them and they know/knew extensively their subject matter. I had always wondered about the plethora of legal ads beckoning everyone to sue over this and that until I read Grisham’s ‘King Of Torts’.
Ah, but this has nothing to do with LRs’ blog and only the latest and greatest stupid comments that will propagate and prolong an erroneous and dangerous idea from ‘the Donald’. It reminds me of the question of what do you call the student who graduated bottom of his medical class? Doctor.
On to more germane thoughts. There is an department in the French government that’s task is to make words of other languages into more acceptable French terminology. But I was oblivious to Le Weekend. It reminds me of when I first learned that the format of Chinese and Japanese traditional music is so different from our scales and octaves. Who knew. Well, not me. I am not really embarrassed to demonstrate my ignorance of many subjects I have little knowledge of since I haven’t run across them before. It is one reason I enjoy these posts. The broad range of experiences that are foreign to mine (pun intended) is interesting and educational for me.
When I think of weekends in my convoluted thinking process I think of the song by Tennessee Ernie Ford, ‘Sixteen Tons’. We have come a long way since then. Three day weekends has been on the table for some time. As is pointed out that working has gone through a seismic change thanks to technology I am awed by it. Perhaps it is in part due to my vocation as a store(s) owner and being tethered to basically one main location. I couldn’t do it from home. It was very hands on and physical, involving lifting, using hand trucks, pallet jacks, forklifts and having a commercial drivers license because of the size of the trucks I drove. It was plebeian and not highly dependent on modern technology. My first cash register was a mechanical NCR that had over 6,000 moving parts. It did have an advantage over electronic registers though in that if the power went out, it had a hand crank to manually operate it. By some standards however I am a technological troglodyte. Just ask my kids. They take great enjoyment from my befuddlement with such things.
My job was a seven day a week business with le weekends being much more than fifty percent of the revenue. Being there was important. 65 to 95 hour weeks were common. But, as Hyman Roth said, “this is the business we’ve chosen”. Or, to be more exact, I chose. Being the owner I did have latitude to get to some of our children’s activities such as soccer and baseball. Upon my forced early retirement due to a serious back injury I agree with your statement of being lost somewhat. I had a large workshop but again was limited physically. I still did many things around the house and yard my doctors would frown upon so I didn’t tell them. What can I say? I tried to be very careful but stubbornness and stupidity entered into it too. There was also the fact that I was responsible for the support of my family because that came with the territory of being the head of the household. I am a delinquent.
Fortunately we were reasonably financially OK and still able to pay for three college educations. The feeling of sending that last check to Penn State was quite a relief. The term ‘discretionary income’ entered our vocabulary. But that was the monetary angle and not what to do with the time on my hands. I will repeat that I was somewhat lost also. More than somewhat. Believe it or not, too much time can actually be tiring. And I don’t consider going to doctors appointments as much of a social life. We saw our friends on weekends and such but they still had jobs during the week. I still owned my business property but collecting rents and dealing with upkeep issues doesn’t take a great deal of time.
So I could have sat around twiddling my thumbs but I chose to read. Something I learned to spend a lot of time on from my mother. She only had a high school education but did the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink. I hadn’t even thought about how much reading I did growing up until my best friend Bob mentioned that whenever he came over I had a book in my hands. So reading became my main activity. I will sheepishly admit to watching the ‘boob tube’ too but usually the news or business channels ( Why do I feel I should not mention regular entertainment as well? Is it a far far better thing to avoid that aspect of TV? Again, where’s Freud when I need him?). I have often wondered why I am watching the program but still reading the little crawls across the bottom and noticing the market and commodity prices bounce up and down. I am nowhere near understanding or involved in the economic stratosphere of your financial work Ranger. I will be on the computer and have the news on while I do. I can vividly recall the morning of September eleventh. The first reports were saying a small plane had hit the tower. Yeah, right. It only took one look to see it wasn’t small. A very sad day for us all.
Now we live in Florida since it is much better for both of us health wise. I should mention that my wife was forced into early retirement because of her own health issues. We both warp-drove over middle age into early decrepitude. Notwithstanding, the move has had the positive effect of broadening my activity choices. We live on the beach on the gulf side and, due to a fortunate feature of geography, we are directly across from the intracoastal. So we have a dock too. I just cross the street and I can kayak. I also do bicycling. I can’t understand why but peddling is the least aggravating exercise I have found. I even bought a nice Hobie kayak that’s has a high back seat with an adjustable lumbar support and peddles. If the paddling gets to me I know I can then use the peddles to make it back to home port.
Well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Sincerely, Not The Only Commentator For Long I Hope
Quite a tale