6 TAKEAWAYS FROM THE WEEKEND EFFECT
Remember when the weekend used to look like a Norman Rockwell painting ( at least in your head), and you could spend it buried in conversation, taking long walks in the park, having dinner with family – and time seemed to slow down? Fast- forward to the present: you’ve got a family, a career, and your Saturday may even be the heaviest of your week when you’re left catching up on work rather than taking a break.
Leave it to Katrina Onstad, a Toronto journalist who has spent countless late nights and sleepless days kicking it in the “gig economy” as a freelance writer, to ironically invest that energy into The Weekend Effect, in which she finds herself on the admirable hunt for the lost weekend, divulging the recent history behind how we earned our so-called “free hours” to how we became “low-stakes doctors always on call.” Here are your takeaways:
1Sundays are the new Monday mornings, spent entirely in dread for the work week. In a 2013 survey cited by Onstad, 81 per cent of Americans said they get the “Sunday blues” anticipating the week ahead. In fact, before the weekend was actually established by the mid-19th century in England, many employees wouldn’t even show up to work on Mondays, using the religious holiday excuse by saying they were “keeping Saint Mary.” ( That holiday never actually existed.) Taking advantage of his lazier colleagues, Benjamin Franklin himself bragged that, when he was younger and worked in a London printing house, he got promoted just by showing up to work on Mondays: “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master.”
2The United States ranks high in average annual working hours at 1,790; 200 more than France, the Netherlands and Denmark. That works out to about 35 hours a week, and according to a Gallup poll, when self- reporting, average Americans with full-time jobs admitted to working between 41 and 47 hours a week. Meanwhile, 29 per cent say they work on weekends, and that’s not including time spent checking email or taking phone calls while in line at the grocery story or stopped at a red light ( and for the record, the average person checks their phone 150 times per day). “We carry our jobs in our purses and packs, on our bodies,” writes Onstad. In fact, Wall Street interns go as far as bragging that they work “nine to five” – 9 a.m. to 5 a.m.; it’s become known as the “American disease.”
3In Japan, they take it one step further with their term for the affliction: “karoshi,” which translates to “death from overwork.” Although the Japanese work ever so slightly fewer hours than Americans, the prevalence of unpaid overtime is significant. For example, one in three Japanese men aged 30 to 40 work over 60 hours per week. Quite literally, people have been dying from overwork; in 2012 alone, 813 families were compensated by insurance companies for “karoshi deaths.” For a legally designated “karoshi death,” the government may pay surviving families around $ 20,000 a year, while a company can end up having to offer compensation of up to $1 million in damages.
4In North America, educated, high- wage earners are working longer hours than 50 years ago; while less educated, lower- wage workers are working less because they’re underemployed, underpaid and juggling part- time jobs. This pattern is called the leisure gap, and it’s relatively new. As recently as 1965, college- aged men had more leisure time than those with high school degrees, meaning the rich can no longer be considered the leisure class. Why? Because those who make more money are more inclined to work more hours since that means more money, and who wants to say no to a few extra loonies and toonies?
5If you do happen to make more, you spend more, and the more you spend, the longer you have to work to support your lifestyle. There’s even some evidence that shopping activates dopamine, “firing up our pleasure centres.” But no amount of spending will ever make us feel complete, which is the gist of “conspicuous consumption,” a term coined in 1899 by economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. The catch is, Onstad writes, “we don’t want time, we want stuff.” While doing nothing was once a sign of status, now, it’s all about what you have and showing it off.
6Another symbol of excess? Brunch, which Onstad triumphantly labels “a declaration of leisure” – it’s the quintessential sign of the weekend. You don’t make deals or swap dollars over pancakes and French toast, but you do trade gossip and make plans. While the word originated with the British, brunch itself has been around for a long time and not just in North America and Europe; there’s the Chinese dim sum and the French le grand petit déjeuner. It can offer community and connection, but it’s also a prime example of conspicuous consumption, and according to writer Shawn Micallef, with whom Onstad chats, it’s all about class: “I wonder if brunch is a kind of conspicuous leisure that’s a really defiant acting out against that busyness. We’re declaring: work is off limits now. It’s like the bailing out of a leaking boat.” And, therefore, a hollow fix to a need for connection.