The Weekend Effect

The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork

Katrina Onstad

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781443449250
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443449274
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

A well-lived weekend is the gateway to a well-lived life. The Weekend Effect shows us how by saving the weekend we can save ourselves.

The weekend—the once-sacred forty-eight hours of leisure—has been lost to overbooked schedules, pinging devices and encroaching work demands. Many of us are working more hours than we did a decade ago, and worse, we allow those hours to slide over seven days a week, giving us no respite to tune out and recharge.

We don’t need the research to tell us that this is hurting us. Our health is deteriorating, our social networks (the face-to-face kind) are weak and our productivity is down. It wasn’t long ago that working less and living more was considered a virtue. So what happened?

In The Weekend Effect, journalist Katrina Onstad, herself suffering from Sunday-night letdown, digs into the history, the positive psychology and the cultural anthropology of the great missing weekend. She pushes back against the all-work, no-fun ethos and follows the trail of people, companies and countries who are vigilantly protecting their weekends for joy, for adventure and, most important, for meaning. Readers of The Happiness Project, All Joy and No Fun and Thrive will find personal and business inspiration in Onstad’s well-researched argument to re-frame our weekends.

 

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS A WEEKEND?

WHAT IS A WEEKEND?” sniffs the Dowager Countess, that cranky truth-teller in the series Downton Abbey. It’s been voted the most beloved quote in the show’s history, delivered by Maggie Smith while the Crawley family sits sparkling around the dining table in beaded dresses and dinner jackets as the (overworked) footman ladles the gravy.

Set in the first blush of the twentieth century, the PBS series shows one English family’s slow tumble through the decades as society shifted from aristocratic rule to the more egalitarian modern age. The Dowager Countess’s line gets the laugh because, for the British nobility, the idea of a week divided into days of work and non-work is incomprehensible—an abstraction. It simply does not apply. In the corridors of abundance where the Crawleys dwell, every day really is like Sunday—to steal a line from Morrissey—filled with tea, gossip, and directives like “Mrs. Hughes, do see to the marble bust of the Earl of Carnarvon today. Gleam is lacking.”

The Dowager Countess’s line resonates with today’s audiences because we, too, ask the question “What is a weekend?”—but for very different reasons. A century ago, workers were striking and marching and shedding blood to win the weekend. Today, many people can’t remember the last time they had two full days off in a row, even when they have a legal right to take them.

The fading of the weekend goes hand in hand with new ways of working. Gone are the days of long-term employment in one organization, with decades of mutual loyalty and a gold watch at retirement; job security is a relic of the past, like a butter churn, or a Slanket. For many, work is painfully insecure, a patchwork of short-term contracts or a series of small jobs that add up to one fragile living. With a swipe, our phones can conjure up workers: if you need a doorknob replaced or a microwave hauled, call Task Rabbit, an odd-job service; if you have a wedding to attend, call Glam Squad, on-the-go makeup and hair stylists. One person’s leisure becomes another person’s labor. It’s worth remembering that there are people on the other end of those swipes, living on high alert, 24/7, their workweek ever-changing. For some, that fluidity is liberating; for others, it’s the end of the weekend.

With the decline of manufacturing and the rise of so-called knowledge work, ideas, not widgets, are the white-collar stock-in-trade. But ideas, by nature, are hard to quantify; an idea doesn’t really have a beginning or an end. Just like work. The economist C. Northcote Parkinson is credited with “Parkinson’s law of efficiency,” which holds that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The phrase came from a 1955 humor essay in The Economist, but it’s only funny because it’s true: Work is like a goldfish that grows to fit the bowl. Work will always take up all the space. And when we’re digitally connected to the office at any moment, day or night, work is virtually—pun intended—limitless. We’re bowl-free, and the goldfish is growing to monstrous, horror movie proportions. Attack of the Work Goldfish—a movie no one wants to see.

But the prospect of taking two days off sounds like lunacy in a flatlined economy where there’s fierce competition for jobs—even mediocre ones. Job insecurity is a strong predictor of poor health, and increases risk for depression. It nestles into the body like illness, this feeling of being constantly in competition with our hypothetical replacements (possibly “foreign”; probably robotic) as well as with the guy at the desk one over, who never seems to leave early for a doctor’s appointment or take off before 8:00 p.m. on a Friday.

For the luckiest workers, the relationship to leisure is complicated by the fact that we like our work. We’ve all had those periods of being lost in the myriad satisfactions of the job; we know the thrill of completion and flow. Another ripple effect of the global economy is that much of the drudgery of white-collar work has been eliminated by smart technology, and—if troublingly—farmed out to offshore workers. A certain kind of privileged knowledge worker might argue that we work more because work just isn’t as bad as it used to be. If one is lucky enough to have a job that requires thinking and creating, then working long hours straight through the weekend might not feel like a loss; it might not even feel like work at all. One might even take a certain pride in not having leisure or weekends. And letting everybody in the office know about those long hours and work-inflected weekends is a strategy—even a subconscious one—to manage anxiety about not having a job at all, an insurance policy against redundancy in downsized times.

But what if all that work is distorting your view of the world, clouding your perception of what matters, acting a little like . . . brainwashing? Welcome to the “cult of overwork,” which is a no-fun cult, free of sex and drugs. In this particular cult, workers have accepted fifty-, sixty-, eighty-hour workweeks without weekends as status quo, or worse, as a credential of success. But in fact, working less makes you more productive. Overworked and under-rested people are bad employees. They make mistakes. They burn out. You don’t want them operating on your kid, and you probably don’t want to hang out with them because they’re boring. And, most urgently, members of the cult of overwork are missing out on their lives.

A weekend is the break that reminds you that you are more than a worker. That was the original promise of the Sabbath: God prescribing a day away from the monotony of labor. Exodus is filled with passages in which the bad boss Pharaoh admonishes the slaves about the bricks they’re being forced to carry back and forth to his endlessly expanding empty warehouse space: “You are lazy, lazy! . . . Go now, and work! . . . You shall not lessen your daily number of bricks!” But God has other ideas, and as He frees His people, He mandates a day of rest, like the one He took on the seventh day, tired from all that creating. He stuck the Sabbath into the commandments as a reminder that life isn’t defined solely by production, or its little friend, consumption. He built humanity into the week.

A brick is a pretty obvious burden, but so much of today’s labor doesn’t leave marks on our bodies; it breaks our spirits, which is an invisible kind of wearing down. The result is tangible: overwork leads to exhaustion, or even depression and suicide. Maybe we continue on in a kind of Stockholm syndrome state because accepting work’s bottomless infringement is a survival technique, a delusion to get through another leisure-free month, or year. But if your occupation is your preoccupation all the time—every weekend—the risk is the possibility of missing your life; of only doing, and rarely being. Even if you love your work, what’s going on? What is a week too full to allow for forty-eight hours of restoration? What is a life without reprieve?

IN ANSWER TO my son’s pleas for better weekends, I sat down with my laptop and did a quick, informal audit of my good and bad weekends. Three columns: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then the activities, as best I could remember. There they were, laid bare in their monotony and occasional doses of pleasure. There was kid stuff (hockey, playdates); domestic stuff (cleaning, groceries, laundry . . . so much laundry); work stuff (emails, article polishing, invoicing); some pleasure (dinner out, K. visited from Calgary, run by the water); and then back to the domestic stuff (basement overhaul, buying the kid running shoes again because running shoes are now made out of tissue paper). Reviewing a few months of weekends (ignoring those occasional special getaways and big events), it was easy to see that the least-satisfying ones were all the same: chores; shopping; work; screens. Repeat.

But the best weekends always included a few key elements, in various iterations: connection; pleasure; hobbies; nature; creativity. I can’t imagine a weekend where I feed all those needs, unless I can, as is my dream, transition to a one-day workweek so my weekends are six days long (please call me if you know how to make this happen). But I came to discover that, with some diligence, at least a few of those ingredients for a good weekend are available to anyone.

When I started writing this book, I wanted to understand what makes a good weekend by talking to people who take them. I thought I’d turn a cool, journalistic eye on the situation, notebook at the ready. But pretty quickly I realized that I needed to start copycatting these good weekenders. In the year it took me to write this book, I went from casual observer of good weekends, to occasional participant, to something of a convert (albeit a work in progress, who spent a chunk of last Saturday answering emails and then watched three Lord of the Rings movies . . . okay, rewatched). It turns out that there are all kinds of unique ways to build a good weekend, but the contours are the same: real leisure isn’t just diversion, it’s making meaning. A good weekend is alert to beauty. A good weekend embraces purposelessness. A good weekend wanders a million different paths, but always involves slowing down and stepping out of the rushing stream of modern life. This moment we live in is defined by what David Levy, professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, calls the “more-faster-better philosophy of life.” The Industrial Revolution established the mind-set that we must always be “maximizing speed, output, and efficiency.”Now, technology and a global economy that never sleeps have accelerated what was already grueling. Getting more, and getting it faster and better, takes time. We can be rich in stuff, yet starving for time. Which is why the weekend is more imperative than ever: it’s the corner of the week ordained to slow time.

Protecting forty-eight hours in a row in this day and age is a superhero move. It takes courage. But if you can put up your hand and hold off the rush, just for two days, you create space for all kinds of experiences that aren’t about success and acquisition, but about that humanity the Sabbath was put in place to safeguard.

On hearing the Dowager Countess’s question, the footman should have stopped ladling the gravy and answered for all of us: The weekend is when we put down the brick and remember what matters.

CHAPTER 2

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WEEKEND

WE MADE UP the weekend the same way we made up the week. The earth actually does rotate around the sun once a year, taking about 365.25 days. The sun truly rises and sets over twenty-four hours. But the week is man-made, arbitrary, a substance not found in nature. That seven-day cycle in which we mark our meetings, mind birthdays, and overstuff our iCals—buffered on both ends by those promise-filled forty-eight hours of freedom—only holds us in place because we invented it.

The weekend begins, then, with an enduring love of seven. The clean, sleek digit is our preferred dose of dwarves, sins, and brides for brothers. As a baby name, Seven has been on the rise for both boys and girls since the 1980s (hardly anyone is named Four). Ancient civilizations loved seven: the Babylonians saw seven celestial bodies, and imbued the number with mystical significance, using it in incantations and exorcisms. Seven is special: the only number between one and ten that cannot be multiplied or divided within the group.

This very ancient idea that seven signifies totality and uniqueness carried over into ever so slightly less ancient Jewish liturgy (perhaps because the Jews were exiled in Babylon, absorbing Mesopotamia’s astrological leanings). In the Old Testament, when God dictated rest on the seventh day, He was not kidding around: “Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.”

Surely it wasn’t only death threats that prompted most religions to protect one day out of seven, though. Humans possess a deep, unassailable need for repose. Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists all exhort a day of rest. Roman emperor Constantine shifted the calendar to emphasize Sunday as the Sabbath day, a move befitting a Christian convert looking for a way to distinguish the new Church from Judaism. The prophet Mohammed decreed that Muslims required one special day in seven for prayer and congregation, and Friday got the nod; some scholars maintain this is because Saturday and Sunday were taken and there was a little three-way competition to attract that coveted undecided pagan audience. Jumu’ah, as Friday public worship is called, isn’t strictly a Sabbath, as work halts for a short time only, long enough for an hour of prayer and a sermon. But for that hour, businesses shutter and a community comes together, even if most congregants return to their daily lives right after. So all three monotheistic religions have anointed one day per week as spiritually significant and set apart from work, and all three of those bump up against one another: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The outline of the weekend is etched in the sacred.

By 1725, most American colonies had passed Sabbatarian legislation banning Sunday work, but the other six days often started and ended in darkness for the laboring class. Newspapers frequently ran anonymous editorials by workers fuming about their epic hours and lousy pay, including one in The Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer by “An Old Mechanic” who complained, in 1784, that his lot “have barely sufficient time to acquaint themselves with the true interests of our country.” The mechanic was too spent after a fourteen-hour workday to down a glass of ale let alone participate in bettering the republic. Framing this plea in nation-building terms may have been an easier sell to eighteenth-century powers-that-be than the more contemporary, first-person strategy many of us shout in our fantasies: “Please, boss, let me go home before eight so I can eat with my family.” But the old mechanic was sincere: the citizens of the fledgling country knew that the success of the great New World experiment required—and revered—a hearty Protestant work ethic. Yet as Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, historian and professor at University of Iowa, points out in his book Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, work wasn’t virtuous in and of itself, but as a means to a higher end. For the religious majority, that end was God’s kingdom on earth. For Walt Whitman, writing in the century after the mechanic’s lament, the true work of the citizenry must be oriented toward “higher progress.” America was already realizing its dream of political freedom and material abundance, meeting the physical needs of its citizens—but then what? Whitman’s “higher progress”—the goal of the new American—called for the pursuit of the arts, the spirit, and the body in nature. He pleaded for attention to “the interior life.”

But when, during these long, hard days, was the average worker permitted to tend his humanity? As Hunnicutt told me, “In the nineteenth century, as industry is becoming more and more efficient, Walt Whitman is writing this beautiful poetry, these democratic vistas, as if he were on a hill looking forward into the future and he sees this coming era when people would be able to meet their material needs with less and less effort.” (Whitman didn’t anticipate email.) “It’s not that work is a bad thing at all; work is absolutely essential for the human creature. But after a certain point, after you get enough, acquire enough, it’s time to move on to those things that are more important, things that constitute the best of the possibility of our humanity.”

HOW THE WEEKEND WAS WON

We abuse time, make it our enemy. We try to contain and control it, or, at the very least, outrun it. Your new-model, even faster phone; your finger on the “Close” button in the elevator; your same-day delivery. We shave minutes down to nanoseconds, mechanizing and digitizing our hours and days, paring them toward efficiency, that buzzword of corporate America.

But time wasn’t always so rigid. Ancient cultures like those of the Mayans and the pagans saw time as a wheel, their lives repeating in stages, ever turning. The Judeo-Christians decided that time was actually linear, beginning at creation and moving toward end times. This idea stuck, and it’s way more boring than a wheel. Straight time means that we are rushing toward an invisible finish line, one without ribbons or high-fives. Our sprint through time, if you really think about it, is because we’re trying to outrun the inevitable: death. Isn’t that ultimately what’s behind the need for speed? Becoming efficient is a way of saying I’m going to conquer time before it conquers me. To slow down, to stop fighting time, to actually feel it—this is an act of giving in, which is weakness. Bragging “I never take a weekend” is a gesture of strength: I corralled time, I beat it down. Actually, taking a weekend means ceasing the fight with time, and letting it be neutral, unoccupied. Why isn’t this a good thing?

Not long ago, free time was a defining political issue. The first instance of American workers rising up in unity wasn’t about child labor, or working conditions, or salaries—it was about shrinking long work hours. Those who came before us fought—and died—for time.

For about a hundred years, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the central campaigns of the organized labor movement was getting time off for workers. But before the two days of a weekend could even become imaginable, they had to tame that rangy workday, and the first U.S. strike over hours occurred in May 1791. A group of P...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Sunday Night Letdown
• Chapter 1: What Is a Weekend?
• Chapter 2: The Rise and Fall of the Weekend
• Chapter 3: The Need to Connect
• Chapter 4: Binge, Buy, Brunch, Basketball: Better Recreation
• Chapter 5: Do Less and Be More at Home
• Chapter 6: The Power of Beauty
• Chapter 7: Manifesto for a Good Weekend
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher