A Century After the Weekend Was Invented, It Has Disappeared. Let’s Reclaim Leisure | Richard Morgan

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It was a Saturday. In fact, the Saturday.

Almost exactly a century ago, on 25 September 1926, Henry Ford instituted a policy of weekends for his workforce. Although various labor campaigns had existed for decades to try to carve out what we now call the weekend, this was the first widespread adoption.

It caught on, buoyed by portraits of leisure gracing the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, drawn by an idealistic young artist from New York named Norman Rockwell. In 1929, Walt Disney leveraged Saturday matinees of his animated films to launch The Mickey Mouse Club. On Saturday 25 June 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, formalizing the weekend as federal policy.

Beyond workplace respite, the weekend began to form its own identity. In 1944, Frank Sinatra popularized Saturday as “the loneliest night of the week, because that’s the night my sweetie and I used to dance cheek-to-cheek”. And the 1948 lyrics to Tennessee Saturday Night blared: “Civilized people live there alright, but they all go native on a Saturday night.”

The postwar boom of suburban pleasures transformed weekends into an anchor of indulgence. Sábado Gigante in 1962. Saturday morning cartoons in 1963. The launch of TGIFriday’s as a singles bar in 1965. Super Bowl Sunday in 1967. And a banner year, 1969, saw the moon landing on a Sunday followed by a weekend of Woodstock.

Then, with a frenzy typical of the 1970s, a rapid-fire pop culture trifecta: Saturday Night Live in 1975, Saturday Night Fever in 1977, and Norma Jean Wright’s disco hit Saturday in 1978. All capped by the sloppy onslaught of brunch chaos.

Weekend vibes seemed unstoppable.

But it all began to come undone – not least thanks to an insidious boast from Jerry Reynolds, a guard-forward on Louisiana State University’s basketball team, printed in Sports Illustrated in November 1983; he is credited with coining the term “24/7”, describing his jump shot as reliable “24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year”.

The phrase “24/7” epitomized a new flattening of time accelerated by CNN, which launched its 24-hour news network on 1 June 1980 (a Sunday, whereas MTV launched a year later on a Saturday). In 1985, “24/7” was popularized by People and soon after by the all-hours creep of cyberspace, pitched simultaneously as an “information superhighway”, “global village” and “digital town square”. Of all the uncanny prescience in AT&T’s memorable “You Will” campaign from 1993, eeriest is its depiction of a 21st-century future where Saturdays and Sundays are indistinguishable from Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Today, after 5,200 weekends since Ford’s first, try explaining the once-sacrosanct status of Saturdays and Sundays to a TikTok influencer, a personal trainer, a flight attendant, a local election canvasser, an Uber driver, or a blogger. In 2023, Pew found that married Americans had relatively unleisurely lives: 24.5 hours of leisure a week for those with children under 18 and 30.4 hours a week for those without. Divided over seven days, those tallies are grim to an extent insurmountable by even the most-bottomless mimosa.

Thanks to the pandemic’s corporate encroachment of working from home and the atomized, optimized overcalculation of our schedules through digital calendars and presumptively social media, Saturdays now take up as much effort – planning, execution and stress – as any manic Monday. If a parent is only as happy as their least-happy child, a globalized worker is only as relaxed as their clients’ least-relaxed time zone. Nearly 20 years later, the 2009 concept of “Sunday scaries” now seems quaint; aren’t weekends scary enough?

The weekend was once the week’s well-earned dessert but its ice-cream has long been melted by the burdensome breach of busyness. The slop we now have can perhaps be refrozen, but it will never again be the confection of yesteryear. We have endured too much fracturing flux. Our lives are too fluxed-up. Has 100 years of weekends worn out its welcome?

Weekends were built in part to bolster church attendance, but a 2024 Gallup survey found 56% of Americans attend religious services seldom or never. God can perform many miracles, but squeezing kindness and grace out of capitalism is not one of them.

What we need is to abandon the weekend’s pretense of work-life boundary. That frontier has been hard-fought, sure, but so too has it been long breached. The battles have plainly favored labor over leisure. No more.

The only way to fight workweek creep on the weekend is with weekend creep in the workweek. Not just casual Fridays or “Saint Monday” but full lunch hours, hard 5pm departures, and charging overtime for after-hours emails. Work “from home” from a park, from a spa, or from abroad. Bring pension thinking – the concept of employer gratitude for labor – to a 9-to-5 scale instead of a worklife that is, to quote the late Dolly Parton, “all taking and no giving”. We need to give our weekend warrior selves presence at Monday morning meetings.

Like 61 million Americans, I am quite proudly, passionately, and perhaps foolishly a freelancer. It can often be a nightmare existence. Even by the US’s precarious standards, I live without a safety net. But I am free. My time is my own. I am writing this essay on vacation, splayed out in bed like a happy starfish, taking in the view of a moonlit seaside castle.

The weekend mindset is an invention overdue for radical reinvention. In April, 69% of Americans had the audacity to tell Gallup pollsters that they had six or more hours of free time “on weekdays or weekends or both”. But I call [checks with editor] … malarkey. For a people who act like they invented freedom, Americans have a radiant knack for making excuses about what they can’t do. At the top of that list is “I can’t find the time.” In fairness, that’s true. Americans cannot find the time to live the lives they want. But that’s the best lesson learned from our construction of weekends: time is not found; it is made.

Make time for yourself. For your loved ones. For your hobbies. For your ambitions. For your booty calls. For your bubble baths. For sushi. For tennis. For tattoos. For book club. For therapy. For karaoke. For leg day. For Lego. For mahjong. For your journal. For your marathon. For your second helping of cheesecake and your umpteenth viewing of The Golden Girls. For Final Fantasy Resonance or Grand Theft Auto VI – or both. For that trip to Japan. For that colonoscopy. For whatever you want whenever you want – because nobody, absolutely nobody, logs their achievements or fond memories in categorization by days of the week. We cannot list the top five Wednesdays of our lives.

Weekends were built for factory labor, not Zoom meetings. The global rise of four-day workweeks show how arbitrary our current set-up is. Why not two-day workweeks if the work can still be done?

Sabbaths began as days of rest. That antiquated thinking dangerously frames such rest in service of labor. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I think God wants more for me than the life of a dishrag whose only peace is on the drying rack in between meals. For me, sabbaths are days of resistance – resistance training, to learn how to stretch and flex my mind and soul as much as my body. Try it. Make time for it. No Sunday Funday – or Taco Tuesday – is complete without it.