alt Hacker NewsThe weekend is 100 years old
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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.
Let's celebrate its 100th birthday by moving labor day to Friday! Every Friday.
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?
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?"
The two-day weekend is a 100 years old.
The one-day weekend is ancient.
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 is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.”
That phrasing sounds a bit strong for temporary symptom relief.
It, like democracy and world trade, is probably a temporary blip.
Once the "elite"realize that drones, AI, and total information awareness provide the tools for complete totalitarian rule, we will pray for 1984
I wonder if someday we’ll have a “monthend”, where most of society takes a whole week off at the end of a month. I think I’d like this better than a 4 day work week. People could come back truly rested.
With the shift to AI, it could happen.
Whenever I hear someone in a privileged job, such as a software engineer, complain about unions or collective bargaining or in fact any form of collectivism, I have to suppress my rage because every concession to the working class, such as weekends, safety standards, overtime pay, PTO, sick leave and so on was paid for in blood by your forebears.
The biggest changes came shortly after Henry Ford conceded the weekend when the ultra-wealthy wrecked the economy (ie the Great Depression) and FDR was elected and, despite being a capitalist, realized he needed to address the very real issues to stave off the perceived threat of Communism. That's where Social Security, the right to join a union and a bunch of other things came from. There was even an attempted coup by the wealthy to avoid all this (ie the Business Plot [1]).
After WW2, the US (in particular) saw this as an opportunity to claw back these concessions. The Soviet Union became the Great Enemy. Former Naxis were recruited to fight Communism, both inside and outside the US. NASA, the FBI, the CIA, NATO, etc all filled with former Nazis despite their "morale lapses" [2] under the Third Reich.
Domestically, we got the Red Scare and McCarthyism. This really went into overdrive in the 1980s when Baby Boomers, whose fears of crime were fuelled by intentional propaganda as well as CIA efforts such as the crack epidemic, voted for Reagan in record numbers. Reagan won 49 states in 1984 (all but Wyoming).
One of the things I respect about Mad Men is how it pointed to the rising cult around Ayn Rand in the 1960s [3]. The 1950s, that tends to be romanticizied by so many hyper-individualists and right-wingers, had a top marginal tax rate of 91% and the CEO to median pay gap hadn't exploded yet [4]. By the way, that idea that CEOs were underpaid came from the Patton studies at McKinsey in this time [5].
My point is that this hyper-individualism is entirely manufactured by decades of spending to undermine any form of collectivism. And as a privileged worker, you owe those less fortunate to you some form of solidarity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/10/28/during-cold-war-cia-fbi-...
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKX8C6qKuac
[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1na8fww/the_typical...
[5]: https://ritholtz.com/2013/08/is-mckinsey-to-blame-for-skyroc...
No, he's 36. /s
[flagged]
does the guardian ever actually write anything worth reading?
Other things that are surprisingly less than 100 years old include electronic music, Germany, Croatia, capitalism, the end of slavery, worker's rights, fiat currency, central banks, stock markets as more than a niche thing, and so on.
Thank you for the submission. I have long wondered if in the old days we had weekend off, and did we just work continuously 365 days?
It is not that working 365 days is hard. It is the job in today's world are very different, Muti tasking, context switching and anything but simple even in the lowest rank.
This is mentally tiring and I have also wondered if it is a recent thing. My argument is that cutting cost over the past 20 - 30 years meant what used to be a 5 person's job is now a 1 to 2 person job.
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:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week