Do you forget what day it is? Lucky you

Overheard at a coffee caravan in a country coastal town: “What day of the week is it? I never know at this time of year.”

“Who cares? That’s why we’re on holidays.”

Ain’t that the truth? Aside from religionists who mustn’t forget their day of worship and newspaper columnists on deadline, the week after Christmas means freedom from knowing what day it is. Freedom from Monday blues, from Tuesday traffic, from the Wednesday hump. Saturday night isn’t even on Saturday, it’s on New Year’s Eve, and the hangover might as well be on a Thursday. Who cares?

End-of-year holidays are a time for contemplating how much of the holiday spirit you would like to import into the rest of the year. Night-time walks. Time in nature. Beach cricket. Card and board games with the family. No TV. More (or less) exercise. No phone reception. Turkey, prawns, fruitcake. And to fully fantasise: not knowing what day of the week it is.

Unlike the day, the month or the year, the seven-day week has no natural reason for being. It’s not governed by the sun or the moon. Its origins and continuance lie in religion and power. In his book The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are, the American historian David Henkin writes that the seven-day week originated with the Roman empire, so that’s another thing they left us along with the roads and the aqueducts. The Romans lined up weekdays with the seven visible planets, but that was only an arbitrary way of co-ordinating their labour force and record-keeping, and if they’d been able to see Neptune and Pluto we might have a nine-day week.

Also spreading were the monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – which organised a week around a single day of rest and observance of rituals. Henkin researched diaries from the industrial revolution and found that along with work being organised into units of seven days, people were increasingly remembering that certain events happened on a Monday, a Friday and so on, instead of by the date. From the 1950s came the week-shaping schedules dictated by television, by government-regulated schooling, and by new religions like spectator sports.

And so here we are, toiling under the yoke of Monday-to-Sunday except for this one blessed week when we forget when to put the bins out.

But is the seven-day dictatorship really a tyranny? Do we really want a whole year of the week after Christmas? The weeks fly by too fast, but is it an alternative not to have a week at all? Do we want to aspire to the weekless condition of early childhood, late-life oblivion, chronic addlement, destitution or infirmity where one day is pretty much the same as the next? Is a perpetual holiday all it’s cracked up to be?

The seven-day week is also, increasingly, not so much a lever of authority as a protection against it. I’m pretty sure Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t know or care what day of the week it is, and they act as if their employees shouldn’t care either. The bleeding of work time into rest time is in such full flow that Australia has needed to legislate a “right to disconnect” law, which should be completely uncontroversial but isn’t. Many large employers have long agitated against weekend penalty rates and would be very happy to collapse the days of the week into a more manageable blur.

Artificial intelligence is unlikely to see any logic in a seven-day week. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, sees a future where AI liberates us all to sit around on beanbags coming up with brilliant innovations like an 8 billion-strong Google brainstorming team. Or maybe AI is just going to take jobs and replace them with nothing but a universal basic income and the beanbags. I don’t see too many people relishing the idea.

The seven-day week has come under attack before. Previous attempts to end it have been exercises of power hiding behind principles of rationality, accountancy or ideology. When Josef Stalin was imposing his Five-Year Plans on the people of the Soviet Union, the week was reconstituted into five-, six- and even 10-day blocks, to get more productivity out of the proletariat and to stagger their rest days more efficiently. Post-Revolution France tried a 10-day week to break the churches and to install a new religion of decimalisation.

David Henkin writes about a global proposal in the 1930s for an International Fixed Calendar, which reorganised the year into 13 months of 28 days each, perfectly aligned so that every date was the same day every year. The Soviet and French models ultimately failed for reasons of politics, while the International Fixed Calendar was rejected by the League of Nations in 1937 presumably because it was just a bit too spectrummy.

Enforcing new calendars from above has had a short lifespan, but an organic evolution towards a more shapeless week is observable in our world. The last remnants of a weekly television schedule will have completely lost their hold within the next decade. The digital economy, offering and demanding everything everywhere all at once, will continue to dissolve the seven-day week from the inside, and the Musks and Bezoses will no doubt dream of manipulating the sun and the earth so that they can replace the 24-hour day with a more commercially attractive proposition. The sales pitch will be that they are turning life into one big holiday; the reality will be that we were not careful enough of what we wished for.

Maybe we’re in a Stockholm syndrome relationship with our seven-day week, dependent on our captor, but as the people at the coffee caravan eventually agreed, it beats the alternative.

“I’ll have a double-shot flat white and a kilo of beans,” the customer said before remarking, to no one in particular, “I’m going to need it to get through this week.”

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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