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- Hacker News
- “It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.”
That phrasing sounds a bit strong for temporary symptom relief.
by andai - Hence the dowager said "What's a weekend?"by dboreham
- A surprising amount of apparently long standing traditions are actually anglo-adjacent inventions from the last 150 yearsby Almondsetat
- 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.
by weaksauce - 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.
- The 7 day week is completely artificial.
Days exist, defined by the rotation of the Earth.
Months exist, defined by the orbit of the moon.
Seasons exist, defined by the solstices and equinoxes.
Years exist, defined by the orbit of the Earth.
Pretty much everything else is an invention of man.
by unselect5917 - May I refer you to timecube?by debo_
- > The 7 day week is completely artificial.
Actually it's 1/4 of a month, which is defined by the moon.
by ars - If we are being even more pedantically correct about this:
1. The statement about months is kinda wrong. Solar months just happen because of the earths orbit around the sun, too, and the division by 12 is how many knuckles you can count on one hand by using your thumb.
Moon months exist, and there are 13 of them, from January to Undecember [Footnote: 1], or whatever you want to call them. But by happenstance if we talk about having a moon-month, we will probably be in a culture that uses a calendar that does not have a two-day weekend.
2. Seasons could be argued to be more complex than just sun-based on fixed yearly cycle. Whether four seasons for everyday life exist seems to depend on latitude, and is a bit counter-intuitive at the equator:
Based on solstices you would expect warm/cold/warm/cold, so twice as many seasons, per year, not half that many. Yet Quito or other cities seem to have rain dependent on yearly circulation effects, but constant temperatures. El Niño/La Niña would probably have at least as much of an effect and are of course not on strictest schedules in such areas, and perhaps make more sense for crop or disaster planning than solar years might.
But Southern Hemisphere does not use a reverse "Christmas is in summer" calendar[2]
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Footnotes:
1: 11th month by name, but some Pope's birthdays reforms happened until we ended up with February at 28 days and no spring's start is the new year, etc.
2: Even if that was Christmas before the popes changed it and/or Christians like to feast when heathens brethren/converts did, simultaneously. And historically more plausible for a time of travel to do a census.
by a3w - The two-day weekend is a 100 years old.
The one-day weekend is ancient.
by ant6n - 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.
- 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?
- Ultimately, it’ll be up to individual companies. For most of them, though, a four-day workweek probably won’t make much sense if they have to pay the same salaries - it’s just not that profitable for the employer. That said, I’d personally love to have more time for the people close to me and, honestly, just live life a little more fully.by MotoriX
- 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.
by danangReader - Saudi Arabia changed the weekend from Thursday-Friday to Friday-Saturday about 10 years ago. The existing week only had 3 days' overlap with western businesses, and the smaller Gulf states had already changed.
The weekend discussion had been percolating quietly inside the Shura Council (royal advisors) for several years, but when the King decided, it was only announced with about 10 days advance notice!
Now UAE has now moved to Saturday-Sunday weekend, but practically it is 2.5 days, starting at noon prayers on Friday.
- Let's celebrate its 100th birthday by moving labor day to Friday! Every Friday.
- Oh is that not how you're living already?
- 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.
by Gecko4072 - 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.
by snovymgodym - 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.by markvdb
- 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
by sethammons - "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, ..
by lukan - 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.by letmetweakit
- > 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.
by toasty228 - 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.
by wahern - 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:
by throw0101a - Have this professor Henkin heard of the moon?by carlosjobim
- 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.by bobthepanda