By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index

When it comes to unpopular causes, making any case against weekends should be right at the top.

When it comes to work – and recreation – we in the 21st Century have, at best, conflicted and contradictory beliefs.

One meme that I have seen recently is, “What is tacky if you are poor, but respectable if you are wealthy?” The answers to this question are as varied as they are revealing about our economy and our attitudes towards it.

You’d think that a certain behavior or expression would be seen as positive or negative no matter the circumstance, but no; context is everything.

One of the most popular answers to the question, “What is tacky if you are poor, but respectable if you are wealthy?” is “Accepting money from the government”. Another revealing answer is “Being lazy”.

Here’s what I mean; it would be easy to make an argument that those who work – especially in the most labor-intensive, dangerous, toilsome labor – get paid the least, and those who spend the bulk, if not entirety of their “work day” schmoozing at brunches, three-martini lunches, banquets and events of all kinds get paid the most. Some of us might call it “networking”, but if poorer people did it, and expected to be paid for it, we are likely to call it wasting time.

It turns out that everything from cash in our wallets to the cars we drive, to the rips in our jeans, to the taxes we pay, each one of those, and much more, has a very different meaning, and set of connotations, based on whether the person is seen as poor or wealthy.

I know poor people who are shamed for driving older, even rusted and battered beater cars (or trucks) – and wealthy people who are commended for (and proud of) driving those same vehicles. Somehow, in the right context, those same beater cars and trucks have been transformed into “vintage” or “collectible” items.

Getting your hands dirty and greasy while working on a “vintage” or “collectible” truck is a sign of pride. Keeping a beater car running when you are poor is a necessity – and certainly not something to be proud of.

The same with wearing “ragged” clothes. Well-heeled fashionistas wear them on talk shows or while performing. Poor people wear them at Walmart.

Working the standard work week is much the same.

To put it mildly, most uber-weathly people have a schedule that has little to do with a working person’s usual schedule.

Working 9 to 5

The work from home (WFH) movement swept through our economy and employment landscape a few years ago. Some, workers and management alike, loved it. A few years later, many, both workers and management, hate it.

Some workers I know demand remote work – others have come to find it alienating and career restraining.

Some who work from home brag about doing a full day’s work in just an hour or two. That makes me wonder first, how honest they are, and, second, how much work they do – or ever did.

When it comes to last minute developments or preferred assignments, in most cases, you have to be present, and often immediately available (and visible) to claim them. WFH keeps workers, no matter how diligent (or deceptive) out of sight, and out of mind.

Who doesn’t like weekends?

Weekends are very strange when you think about them.

How we divide and measure and keep track of time is peculiar as well.

The ancient Romans gave us planetary names (like Saturn’s Day – Saturday, or Moon’s Day – Monday) which were the established popular terms, far too strongly entrenched to be displaced by the “Christianized” names church officials preferred and spread through most of western Europe many centuries ago.

The seven-day week is ancient, and is almost certainly based on the 28-day lunar cycle, divisible into four periods of seven days, at the end of which the moon enters a new phase (called a new moon, the phase when the moon is between the Earth and the sun, and thus the side of the moon that is in shadow faces Earth and is not visible to the naked eye.) In other words, in theory at least, for most of the ancient world, every month was the same length as February.

The word “weekend”, as we know it today, is a relatively new term. It was barely used in print or conversation before about 1940, but is, of course, widely used now. And, as virtually every calender shows, the “weekend” is in fact both ends of the week; the beginning and the end.

Weekend expectations

Most of us carry through our standard work week visions of the weekend – a time many of us consider an endless reservoir of time, which, by late Sunday afternoon, for many of us, seems to have evaporated before we had the opportunity to grab it. In other words, most of us anticipate weekends with high, even near-fantastical, expectations. And, all too often, before we even get our party clothes out, it’s dinner time on Sunday.

I don’t know about anyone else, but my weekends rarely live up to their (near impossible) expectations. And if they do, I usually find myself exhausted.

Several years ago I attended a workshop in preparation for retirement. They were talking about money and time management and they made a point of saying that, in retirement, “every day is a Saturday”.

I am convinced that most of us look at weekends the way we look at the holidays or many family gatherings – we look forward to them and anticipate all kinds of scenarios – some of which may even be possible. And the vast majority are not even remotely likely.

In other words, most of us spend most of out time anticipating weekends (or holidays, or even retirement) and far less time actually experiencing them – and they rarely meet the expected visions we have built for them.

The irony of weekends (or mine at least) is that I approach them with fantasies of how much I will get done or some adventure I will go on – but somehow, what I need to do supplants all the things I wanted to do and the weekend becomes a battleground between what I intended and what I end up doing. In other words, I want to work – and play – on the weekend – and in both cases, rarely meet my own expectations.

I often have the sense that weekends are too short, but almost at the same time, on many weekends, I wouldn’t want them longer.

Remember work/life balance?

Several years ago, work/life balance was a hot topic. Work/life balance was typically defined as the amount of time you spend doing your job versus the amount of time you spend with loved ones or pursuing personal interests.

The core assumption was that there was a clear distinction between work and personal life. Technology and the WFH movement put an end to any feasible separation of those two. Virtually all of us, to some degree, are “on-call” semi-permanently.

From side gigs, like Uber or Lyft to selling items online, work and “life” have become blurred to the point of no distinction whatsoever.

Maybe the standard work week isn’t so bad after all…

The Monday to Friday schedule has gotten a lot of bad press lately, and many have criticized or attempted to abandon it, but I think that for many of us, not only is it here to stay, but to a large degree it helps us as individuals and a larger society organize our time.

Without the flickering lure of weekends, when would events, from conferences to celebrations, be scheduled?

For better or worse, the seven-day week, the five-day work week and the two day weekend frame our lives, no matter what we call them.