Working 10 or even 14 days in a row with virtually no time for anything else made me reassess the meaning of weekends and their social function. I used to see them as a way to unwind and relax, a way to catch up with one's own private life and all the things falling too short during the work week.
And while that is still true to some extent, I now see them primarily as a marvellously calibrated social institution to keep rebellions and uprisings at bay, to prolong the illusion of permanence of artificial social structures and to give a false sense of rhythm to an otherwise mundane existence against our own human intuition and inner calling.
Weekends - they are widely celebrated, cherished and for many people they are the only means of feeling free, if only for two days. One of the days is often needed just to catch up on sleep while the other one has to be spent wisely - after all, one remaining day of private life means an obligation to choose priorities amongst all the things you actually want to be doing with your life.
A thing that has long troubled me about weekends is the recurring sense of rhythm, the weird notion that sundays are hardly as enjoyable as saturdays simply because "sunday" means: monday is just around the corner, related and tied to all the things we think we have to do on a daily basis in order to survive.
And so it strikes me more and more that weekends and the liberty to party, drink to excess and to stay up late at least one night of the week, maybe two, is a great mechanism to keep revolution tendencies in check. If you are working a job where you literally have no day off for a good 14 days in a row, you will feel the sting of the unfairness surrounding it all. If your paycheck was great that would be one thing, but costs are rising steadily while wages hardly ever catch up, at least in most actual industries moving, producing and working with physical goods... and so the subliminal feeling of exploitation is made plain and palpable. I also think this is what drives so much of the madness and rage in humanity - all this pressure eventually has got to go somewhere, to be vented...
It feels like slavery, probably because it is. Weekends then have this amazing capacity to temporarily quell our anger, to create the illusion of a balanced life and to allow us to temporarily vent steam about our otherwise dreaded existence in the matrix (in case we are working a job we don't like or find useful).
Chunks of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness
Weekends make use of the concept psychologists refer to as "chunking", in a most devious manner. Weekends split up our tireless devotion to a cause we don't believe in and think we are obligated to continue with into infinite chunks of just bareable stretches of time. Many people exist only for the weekends because that's the only time they feel they are the center of their own life. And they wouldn't be wrong - a human being has a need to be at the cause of his own reality and 9-5 jobs often feel like the complete opposite.
Therefore weekends are a pacifier so that we can swallow our anger, our dissonance to what we are doing, and they always - by their nature - dangle a carrot in front of our eyes, a perpetual recurring carrot that the whole week is geared towards and referenced by. Come wednesday the weekend is in sight. Friday hardly counts because "the weekend is almost here", and mondays everyone has long faces because of the existence of weekends and what a recently passed weekend implies - a long time until the next one.
And so I vow to say that while certain industries have people working on weekends and some even have special permits to open sundays, the general tendency of weekends as a social institution will remain. Simply because the gang is too cunning to remove that controlled-venting-mechanism for people's frustration that allows the matrix to continue operating...
Let us rise up and find ways of living where everyday is the weekend and work has become play. If you feel the pain on monday morning and you want to do something else with your life than what you are doing - that is healthy more than anything. Go find a way to do that, and let weekends as the vacation from your everyday frustration become a dim memory of how things used to be before you realized your own potential and started doing what your heart called for: on a regular basis, not only on occasion when mundanity allowed for it...
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