How time changed with the times.
I came across an article that said a third of the world’s population under lockdown in some fashion. It appears that there have been people claiming (or complaining?) that time is abundant on their hands. On the other hand, some say time did not change, we changed how we perceive it. But hasn’t time been the same all this time?
When man was a simpler animal, living in natural caves, time was probably just split in two. Day and night. It was either safe to venture out and hunt or grow food, or it was not. It would have been spectacularly straightforward.
But soon, civilizations began to form. Rules were needed to keep things from falling apart; for the benefit of everyone. Everything would have to be standardized to prevent confusion and conflict. The days and nights would have to be divided into manageable chunks and then into smaller chunks for even more clarity. As the civilizations grew, they began developing systems of timekeeping which were localized and thus different from one another. In India and China, these historical systems are still prevalent, especially in cultural contexts. On the western side, Egyptian and Roman civilizations also had systems which weren’t identical. The commonality was that most of them used the movements of the moon as the basis for creating calendars. Ironically, since the moon was the same for the entire globe, there were a few similarities across all systems in the larger pieces of time. For example, one cycle of a new moon and a full moon became one basic unit and 12 such units — in various combinations — became an annual unit. But when it came to the division of days into smaller units, there were a lot of differences. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, the Egyptian system came to use 24 hours for a day. One theory goes that the idea was to split the day and the night into 12 hours each to maintain the continuity of 12 months in a calendar. But anyway, the point is that this where the 24-hour day began.
A similar known-unknown is the origin of the 7 day week. Here’s an interesting snippet from an article in The Atlantic:
“Seven days,” wrote Witold Rybczynski in the August 1991 issue of The Atlantic, “is not natural because no natural phenomenon occurs every seven days.” The year marks one revolution of the Earth around the sun. Months, supposedly, mark the time between full moons. The seven-day week, however, is completely man-made.
Whatever the reason, there was a 7-day week, with one or two days being given special significance depending on religious preferences. This continues even today.
But where did the 5-day work week come from?
It came as a solution to a problem. There was only one day in a week allocated as a holiday. It was chosen as Sunday to cater to the majority of the workforce. Those of a religious bent prayed. Many others partied.
Hard.
This resulted in a few of them becoming sufficiently tipsy that they would have to skip work on Mondays, causing two problems. One, productivity suffered, because this was still the beginning of the 20th century. These were the times where everything was manual as robots weren’t invented. Two, the rest of the workforce were disgruntled with the extra work and the perceived lack of freedom for indulging in relaxing activities.
“Why can they have fun and skip work, when we pray and be good?”
Thus, Saturdays were turned into half-days and workers could play or pray, and then play more or pray more on Sundays so that order was restored on Mondays. This, then, became the accepted norm for decades.
Around the same time, Henry Ford showed his ingenuity by creating a factory with an efficiency that wasn’t even imaginable before him. His biggest invention, in some ways, was the 8-hour workday. It was based on simple arithmetic and was explained thusly: 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest and 8 hours for rejuvenation. It worked well. But he could not avoid the five-and-a-half-day work week when everyone else was doing it. So he did what he does best. Be unconventional. He brought in a 5-day work-week and increased the hourly wages to balance out the loss of half a day’s work. He made working for 40 hours for an equivalent pay of 44 hours or work the “new way of life.”
It stayed unchanged for so long that it is now time to look for a newer “new way of life,” one where results are given precedence over the number of hours put in.
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Originally published at https://abhikb2005.substack.com.
