Four day work weeks should be about more than just energy. Take back Sunday!

Posted on August 16th, 2008 by Mark.
Categories: Editorials, Just Dumb, My Life.

The world is akin one of those conveyor belts dubbed “people movers” that you find at Disney World or Universal Studios.  You know, those horizontal escalators that drag your lazy carcasses from the parking lot to the park.   Well the world is one of those and it’s moving at the speed of a bullet train.  You don’t catch much of the scenery when you’re speeding through a countryside on a fast moving train and likewise not much of life is savored whilst being run ragged through the landscape that is living.  Passé terms like “hours become days” and “days become weeks” apply in our time.  Everything becomes a mash as one moment rushes into the next and there seems to be no end in sight.

Now we’re all consumed with “energy”.  How will we survive without the ability to whisk ourselves from one unimportant and irrelevant process to the next?  I know, FOUR DAY WORK WEEKS!  Yeah, now we’ll have the time to be great parents and better human beings!  Wrong.  I don’t know about you but I’ve been out and about on Fridays and it seems to me that four day work weeks are already being abused.  It’s just an extra day to peruse the aisles of Walmart or the local shopping mall.  We’re not going to save anything by going to four day work weeks unless we do it in tandem with something that hearkens back to my childhood… (which was not so long ago), everything needs to be CLOSED on SUNDAY.

I remember Sundays when I was a kid.  I remember everything being closed, even gas stations and I grew up in the metropolis that is New York (albeit Staten Island).  Sometimes it was inconvenient.  Sometimes you WANTED something, but rarely did you NEED something.  Somehow we managed to survive the stores being closed on Sunday.  Somehow we survived each other’s company.  I can remember Sundays, sitting on the stoop at my grandmother’s house watching a colony of ants (they lived in the crevices of that stoop for a long time) rush around doing their busy work… and likely wondering when it was that my small foot would come crashing down upon their heads.  I remember thinking how strange it was that they were forever busy running to and fro.  Now, I am one of the ants.  This world has made us all like those small things crazed in their “rushy rushy”.  When I was a kid Sundays were spent with parents, grandparents and family.  The work of the day was getting a nice meal to the table.  Nobody was rushing anywhere.  Nobody NEEDED to do ANYTHING.  Now the only thing that feels like every Sunday of my childhood is THANKSGIVING.  One day a year to remind me of so many from my youth.

So when I see people saying, “We need a four day work week,” I agree with them and add… “and everything needs to be closed on Sundays.”  It isn’t about energy consumption, it’s about people.  Do you really need the ability to purchase a plasma television at 3AM on a Sunday morning?  Will you die waiting a day to pick up a package of underpants?  I mean really people, what’s with the 24/7 Supercenters?   A pharmacy is one thing, but does Walmart sell a damn thing that YOU HAVE TO HAVE in the middle of the night?

Instead of looking at just the energy situation, we need to look at the people situation.  The world is going mad.  We’re under assault day in and day out.  An assault of advertising and information that is incessant and overwhelming.  Four day work weeks are fine, but we also need to take back OUR Sundays.

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