Whom Do Your Weekends Belong To?
Is it you?
48 hours
36, if we account for sleep — and let’s be honest here, you ain’t getting more than 6 hours of snoozetime.
But that’s all we get. A week straight of working and all we get are 48 hours. And we are really really good at being terrible at spending these 48 hours.
The Overly-Idealized
We love weekends, maybe even a little too much.
And why shouldn’t we? Weekends are the fun, little exclamation marks at the end of the exhausting sentence that is your week. It’s a time to HAVE FUN — or something like that.
Weekends are when you unwind, when you relax, when you think about the future and when you get shitfaced. Weekends are when you reconnect with yourself, your extremely niche and weird hobbies, your family, your friends and your family friends.
Weekends are when you plan for the future when you brainstorm new ideas, and when you explore new places. Weekends are when you take a break from the world when you take a break from the chaos of everyday life.
Wow, that did sound like a Hallmark commercial.
All that’s all good and well, except it’s not. While I love my weekends, I very much don’t care for this idealized, over-saturated, high-pitched version that modern culture loves to sell.
Too Responsible To Relax
Weekends arrive with almost this crescendo of excitement and anticipation.
You slog through the week, all the while staring at the distant mirage that is your Sunday. And when they do finally arrive, you are stuck between bloody recovering from the trauma of the week, having fun and doing all the things you want to do, and resting up to prepare for the upcoming week.
A strange paralysis sets in. That state of “UHHHHHH HEELP”
The endless possibilities become overwhelming. Should I finally tackle that neglected hobby? Go on that day trip I’ve been planning? Or simply melt into the couch and binge-watch something mindless, while picking out popcorn shells from between my couch cushions?
But this time, this time to just be and not do anything is also wildly important to us. We, or rather our minds, need leisure time to fulfill important psychological needs.
I’m unhealthily dependent on to-do lists. It’s gone to the point where I now find myself creating Excel spreadsheets for everything.
And that’s saying something, after what happened last week.
I make them for my morning routine, and that’s pretty normal. But I also create them for my post-work activities, after I’d supposedly logged off. And that’s not normal.
I feel like the days from Monday to Friday are yours. You may get just snookered at work, and your mental self may be half buried in a ditch, but that time is yours. You have this wonderful license to tell most everyone and everything else to bugger off.
But your weekends are not yours. At least, that’s been my case for some time.
It’s a paradox, creating to-do lists to bring order to chaos, yet feeling the weight of those lists as they transform your weekends into structured, planned-out extensions of the workweek.
The very tools meant to enhance productivity end up contributing to the encroachment of work into what should be your personal time.
Dear Work,
I, as someone with the social life of a sloth, don’t really mind working on weekends. As long as I am getting paid, I am completely fine to attend 56 more useless meetings. It’s when you don’t really have to work, but you have to think about work that everything goes haywire.
Most of us are just unable to completely detach ourselves from work. So our Saturdays turn from a day of lounging around and watching TV to a day of lounging around and watching TV but also kinda-sorta thinking about your coming week.
This cognitive strain, where the mind constantly ping-pongs between the desire to unwind and the subconscious preparation for the workweek ahead, often leads me to an incomplete sense of relaxation.
The weekends, rather than providing a full break, become a hybrid of leisure and work contemplation, most definitely impacting overall well-being.
I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT FUN!
Your weekends don’t belong to this idea of having “fun” when “fun” means just a few things.
Fun is going out with people you don’t care about to places you don’t care about.
And more than that, this entire concept of “to each their own” gets dumped into a trashcan. When it’s a Saturday, everyone nods and decides that going out, partying and being basic is the only true way to unwind.
(I sound very judgy)
The diversity of personal preferences is overshadowed by a collective agreement that fun must fit a predefined mold. The idea that relaxation can take various forms and that some might find joy in calm reflection or solitary pursuits is drowned out.
Social media, as it very often tends to, only helps make everything worse. The perfectly curated feeds of seemingly endless parties and vibrant gatherings create an illusion that everyone is living their best life, all while you contemplate the merits of a quiet evening at home.
cough there is a term for this.
All of this doesn’t even address just how goddamn isolating weekends can be. Unless you are a social butterfly, and sometimes even when you are, your Saturdays can be painful for those without a rock-solid support system and connections.
Watching your work friends party around the city while you are on your couch cuddling your cat only makes it worse.
PS — Cuddling a cat is 1000% better than getting shitfaced at some seedy bar.
This picture-perfect idea of leisure and free time gets whacked upside the head when it clashes with the more tangible, ever-present thing that are chores. Instead of lounging in your overly-expensive suede couch, you find yourself knee-deep (hopefully not literally) in the kitchen.
Your weekends don’t belong to the sky-high pile of dirty dishes and to the white vacuum of your fridge. They belong to errands you didn’t account for, and appointments you completely forgot about.
It’s as if we create this mental barrier during the week. A barrier that rigorously filters everything unrelated to our weekly routines and a barrier that falls apart completely during weekends.
And then when Saturday comes in with a rush of muted excitement, we get blindsided by all the terrible little tasks we now need to complete.
The best thing about weekdays is just how busy most of us are. We are, for better or for much worse, living in the present. A regimented routine combined with mountains of work does wonders to keep you from meandering into the past or panicking about the future.
Your weekends don’t belong to the downward spiral of terrifying thoughts and self doubts you somehow fought off during the week.
But as the weekends approach, all of those fun anxieties and stresses rush in as the bustling shield of routine and non-stop meetings disappears.
Instead, weekends force you to directly or indirectly address all those terrible little thoughts we all have. And I don’t know about you, but as a self-professed coward, that’s never a fun time.
Overthinking can truly be the worst. Because not only are you actively ruining your weekend, but you also kinda end up self-isolating and pushing people away.
Overthinking can truly be the worst, also because it’s basically impossible to not to do.
There is no one strong enough to sit at their dinner table, close their eyes and basically force themselves to not think. Cannot be done.
The only true way to overcome overthinking is to focus on other things rather than consciously focusing on your tumbling thoughts.
The Fountain Of Free Time
Yaada yaada, but who cares. Why are weekends so bloody precious?
Weekends are the time to relax and unwind, and that is true. But we say that and find ourselves spending those 48 hours engaged in activities that are anything but relaxing.
Multiple studies show a very correlation between the quality of your weekend rest and your weekday productivity. Studies have reported that the intensity of negative effects decreases from workdays to weekends.
92% of people work on both weekends and weekdays. That’s an alarming statistic. Such a high percentage of weekend workers can change how we approach work as a whole. It encourages and pushes this terrible idea of “we live to work”.
This number also points out how wildly inept we are at disconnecting, sometimes literally, after Friday ends, and how we are never truly “not working”.
And all this is discounting the face-value things this impacts. When we work so so much, on days we are to relax, we strain our work-life, we get this much closer to burnout.
Hell, by working on weekends, we actively harm our productivity. That’s scary, sad and more than a little ironic.
Even though I’m a crazy idiot, I’m not the only one who feels strange during the weekends. There is an actual term for this thing. It’s called “weekend anxiety syndrome”, or the much more cooler “Sunday Scaries”.
Your weekends belong to you. They just, only, completely belong to you. They belong to your mental peace, to your personal projects, to your hobbies and interests. They belong to self-care and self-pampering.
Most of us have really really stressful weeks and those 2 measly days are all we get to get our heads straight. And yes, some of the stuff we need to do on weekends cannot be helped.
And I don’t have the solution, I don’t know if anyone does really. But there are ways to enjoy your weekends and own your weekends while still being a responsible adult.
For the past month or so, I have been consciously keeping a mental tally of all the “activities” I somehow get reeled into during my weekends. Now I am sorta lucky, considering I am a lonely little shit with a Petri dish-sized social circle, but doing this has helped me recognize my priorities.
I really do not know how to feel about weekends, part of me loves them and part of me fears them. But I do know something, I know that weekends are sorta very important.
And they should be treated with the importance they deserve.
Originally published at https://thehumaning.substack.com.
