From the Vault: The Seven Day Week, Part 3

Published Feb 18, 2023, 11:00 AM

Our modern world is bound to the seven day week, but why is this the case? Is there anything in the cosmos or the inner workings of the human body that dictate this arrangement? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the history and invention of the seven day week. (originally published 03/10/2022)

Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for a vault episode. This is part three of our series on the seven day Week. This originally published March tenth. Here you go. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our series about the seven day week. If you haven't listened to the two previous parts, you should probably go do that first. This one will maybe make more sense if if you do that. But hey, if you want to, you know, fly by the proverbial seat of your pants, let's go for it. Here we are in part three. All right, well, you know, to kick things off, I thought, as a potential fun aside, I thought we might think about weeks on other planets. Um, you know, because if we're if we're going to have just a planet centric week based on solar days, so one complete rotation of said planet, then this is about how it all breaks down here on Earth. One week is a hundred and sixty eight hours twenty four hour days. Seven of those makes sense simple math um. On Mercury, one week is one thousand, four hundred and eight hours or about fifty eight earth days. So on Mercury that it is a hard core t g if mentality, like by the time you get to the weekend you are ready to party exactly. And it's even worse on Venus. I mean, we know Venus is as a hell world. On Venus, one week is forty thousand, twenty four hours, or about one thousand, seven hundred and one earth days. Now, the really weird thing about Venus would be that I think it is the case that on Venus a day is actually longer than a year, meaning that it takes the planet Venus longer to rotate on its axis than it does to go entirely around the Sun. Right, Yeah, so that would mean that a week on Venus is actually more than seven years on Venus. Yeah, and again we're just taking the idea that you know, we have a solar day here on Earth. Well, complete rotation is a day on another planet, and therefore seven of those would make a week on any given planet. All right, now, you know we already touched on Earth head on out to Mars. The red planet has twenty five hour days, so it's not too far off. We're talking a hundred and seventy five hour week. But then you go to Jupiter. Here you have ten hour days, so we're talking about a seventy hour week. Saturn eleven hour days, so that's pretty easy to calculate seventy seven hour weeks um. And then by the time we get to uh Uranus, we're talking we're looking at a seventeen hour days, so that's a hundred nineteen hour weeks, and on Neptune sixty hour days a hundred and twelve hour weeks. You know, this should all I think, drive home, how you know, nonsensical In many respects, the concept of a week or even a day is when you move off of Earth. Uh for instance, just looking at Mars, the lack of a quote leisurely orbiting moon, as the Planetary Society puts it, means that you you don't really have Martian months for example. Oh yeah, so the year on Mars doesn't really divide into manageable time units like our months, right, So when we come to like determining like what time it is, on Mars. Like that's that's ultimately a whole whole old different topic unto itself. Scientists defend to devise, uh, you know, different ways of thinking about time regarding another planet. Um. And of course you can imagine how how complicated this would become if you had ultimately had some sort of colonial system in place on another world. Actually, you know what I just realized. I realized I was thinking about the speed of the orbits of the moons of Mars entirely in the wrong direct action, right, because I was thinking, oh, yeah, I've forgotten how long it takes some maybe maybe it takes some like months and months on on Earth to go around Mars one time, But no phobos orbits Mars like once every eight hours or something, Right, it's just whizzing around, yeah, not very leisurely. So it's all do you know, I guess a reminder to of just you know, so so many so much of our contemplations of time are based on again, as we discussed in the first episode, the the observable world, the observable cosmos, And you're not going to have the same a set of stuff in place on other worlds, or it's going to mean something different, such as how long it seems to take the sun to rise and then to set. So this, obviously this leads to the next logical point is that if you were to watch the video from the Ring movies and therefore invoke the wrath of of of of a strange VH tape based ghost, you would, of course have seven days left to live. Those seven days would be best spent on an off world colony, you know, preferably heading on over to uh to Venus. I think now, I think this came up when we're actually talking about this earlier, and Rob, you and I both forgot that. In the movie they explain why it takes seven days, because that's like, you know, how long the creepy ghost girls in the well or whatever. But but but Ye had to remind us, Seth had to remind us. But we both forgot that. And you had the most amazing theory about the origin of the seven day curse period in the Ring and it had to do with our childhood memories of Blockbuster video. Yes, Uh, well, I I I was thinking, okay, seven seven days? Why seven days? Seven is is not an unlucky number in Japanese culture. It seems like four would be more fitting for that if we were going to go that route. So what is it about seven? I was thinking, well, maybe it's the seven day rental period, right, and because we know that that she likes working through VHS tapes, so maybe it has to do with the VHS rental cycle. Of course, what this got me wondering about is how come in the Ring movies nobody ever talks back on the phone, you know, so you get the phone calls like your cursed seven days. How come nobody ever just like tries to negotiate. Well, you know, sometimes they have to uh participate in a survey after the call for quality assurance purposes, right, So there is that. In reality, I think the Ring videotape would probably give rise to a subculture of of what what would you call them? Like curse baiting scam fighters, you know, like the people who played pranks on the people who do the I R. S. Scam phone calls, except they're scamming Samara. Yeah. Yeah. Though it is interesting when you compare the two because when in the fictional situation, we have an evil entity calling you and wishing you harm and uh, it's it's very much the same thing when you have somebody trying to run some sort of a phone scam like it's it's almost it's quite unsettling, like to to to be speaking to somebody and realize this is someone who wishes to do me great harm. You've won a free cruise, but you first you need to send us some iTunes gift cards. Yeah, yeah, that sort of thing. But you know, this also makes me think that, Okay, if we have a technological ghost here, maybe two potentially well not not actually, but within within this argument looking to an artificial cycle of time and using that as a way to to judge some other act. It does make me think about like the back in the old days of watching television, Um, there was a set TV cycle and I'm not saying it would was actually to the point where like a heavy, heavy TV consumption would make you know what day of the week it was based on what was on television. But it was easy to sort of have that that line of thinking in your head, you know, like you know what what is supposed to come on on Mondays? You know what what is the Monday night entertainment versus the Tuesday night Uh, you know, the movie of the week sort of thing. Um you could you could imagine yourself leaning into that view the cosmos. And in a sense, it's kind of like ancient timekeeping. It's based on the observable universe. Only your observable universe is what's on the television screen. Is USA up all night? Yeah? You know what day it is? Then, Now, as delightful as all that that is, we do actually have more serious contemplations regarding the seven day week to get to here. Oh right, so I guess in this episode we're probably going to talk some more about the history of the seven day week, like where it comes from and how it has changed over time. There is one paper I came across that if you want a really, really good, detailed, scholarly deep dive on this issue, uh, I would recommend This is actually not a paper, sorry, This is a book chapter in a historical book by the academic publisher Bill called Calendars in the Making The Origins of Calendars from the Roman Empire to the Later Middle Ages published and this chapter is called the seven day Week in the Roman Empire Origins standardization into fusion. And this is by Ilaria Boultra Guini and Sasha Stern and both of these authors are scholars of Hebrew and Jewish studies at University College London. This is a really good, really detailed chapter, but it is sort of written for scholars, so it's good if you want maximal detail on on the origins of the Western seven day week. UH given basically our best picture of the evidence within the last year or so. But I just thought I would mention a few things from it that struck me as as interesting for the lay person. Now, of course, they acknowledge the same thing that we've mentioned several times now, which is that the the deep origins of the seven day week are poorly understood because we don't have a founding document really of the seven day week says here is where the week begins, and you know, and from here on out everybody will use it for this, that and the other. Instead, we have little tidbits of evidence from from literary sources here and there in antiquity, and occasionally from UH from arcol logical of finds that give evidence of people using some kind of seven day weekly schedule in the ancient Near East. But they these pieces of evidence are fragmentary and a lot of times we don't know exactly what broader cultural conclusions to draw from them. So, for example, we know that by the first few centuries c E. In the Roman Empire, people were at some level using seven day weeks, but we don't know exactly how far this practice goes back and what all of the exact inputs on it were. Now, in the previous episode, we talked about, uh, this weird scenario that has been noted by historians where there were multiple different kinds of weeks in the first few centuries the e of the Roman Empire, UH that had different numbers of days in them, which sounds terribly confusing. But so, for example, you had this eight day week that seemed related to commerce, so it's the eight day mark its cycle. But then you also had these seven day periods such as the seven day Roman astrological week, in which the days were named after gods or planets. And then also the seven day cycle of the Jewish Sabbath, which was acknowledged uh, certainly by Jews within the Roman Empire, but also by by other groups as well. Yeah, so you had these had divination and religion playing a role, but you also had like the hard realities of commerce and the economy. But even you know, but none of these are are fixed, uh, you know, figures in a given world like these are things that will change over time and do right. And so there is one point in this book chapter where Boltu, Guini and Stern actually disagree with something that I think we got from one of our other sources, which was the book The Seven Day Circle by Avatar Zerubavel, which claimed that the the Jewish practice of observing a seven day cy goal with a with a day of rest traced back to Mesopotamian practices. But the authors of this paper actually say that despite what other authors have alleged, there's actually really no very good evidence tracing the seven day week back to ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian practices. We we ultimately don't know exactly where it comes from. Now this, I wonder if this explained some of the hesitancy you see to really nable us down in some of the other sources, like for instance, Fagin and aveni Um, who I acided in the first episode. Oh yeah, they were more hesitant to to put a specific origin on it. Yeah, So it seems like it's still very much a topic of of of of studying consideration at least. But we do, of course have literary evidence from the ancient world of places where some kind of seven day weekly cycle or referenced. Of course, the big one is UH is the Hebrew Bible making reference to the Sabbath. So we see the idea of a seven day week the days leading up to the Sabbath day in the Hebrew Bible. Though interestingly UH the authors of this of this book chapter claim that in the Hebrew Bible there are actually no events that are said to occur on specific days of the week in the Hebrew Bible itself. The dated events are dated by other methods, such as by by month or by year um. And this raises questions like they ask, okay, so it's clear that at some point Jews were observing a Sabbath day, But they say, for example, we don't know in the early periods if Sabbath observance was synchronized across different Jewish communities or did like local Jewish communities all have their own Sabbath cycles. But once we get closer in time to the Roman period, we do see Jewish sources making specific reference to two things occurring on certain days of the week, specifically on the Sabbath day. UH. So, for example, they referenced the Book of First Maccabee's, which is a text from the late second century b c. And this makes reference to something occurring on the Sabbath day. They also make reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are of course these fascinating documents from Jewish communities dating back to the second to first centuries b c. UH, And they say that the Dead Sea Scrolls in some cases make reference to a calendrical system. This was kind of confusing, but I think the way I understand it is they had a year that had a different number of days than our year. I think it was three hundred and sixty four days, which unlike our year of three hundred and sixty five point to five days or whatever. UH. That year would divide evenly into fifty two weeks, so you get a whole number of weeks within the year, and this would be for seven day weeks based around the observance of the Sabbath. But then they also point out that a a seven day Sabbath week is mentioned and observed within the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible in in the Salt. But one question would be, okay, why the sudden appearance of these references to things happening on uh days of the week in Jewish literature from around the second century b CE. What happened around there? So to read from the authors, they write quote the second century b c. Invention of the seven day week is a time reckoning system, even if only theoretical or literary, may well have been related to the revival and promotion of the observance of the Sabbath, which is credited to the Maccabeean rebels of the one sixties, but was surely also shared and promoted by other Judean groups at the time, such as the communities described in the Kumran literature, and this would be the ones associated with the Dead Sea scrolls uh and may have percolated further onto the diaspora in Egypt, as the papyri above mentioned possibly suggest promotion of Sabbath observance in this period, may have elicited the conceptualization of the week as a recurring sequence of seven numbered days, and does a fundamental structure of time reckoning and calendars. Uh. So, Again, this is one thing where we have to sort of speculate. We don't know for sure, but the authors here are saying it's possible that we see this sort of weak consciousness emerging in Jews of the second century BC as part of a religious revival, a sort of gathering of enthusiasm for observance of the Sabbath as a as a religious practice that of but then, of course this could end up having other functions within people's lives. If you're observing uh, you know, a week leading up to the Sabbath that could serve other scheduling functions if practice for long enough. Though of course, they acknowledge that we don't know exactly what role these week days played in in people's day to day lives early on. Um. But another thing that's important to mention is that the early Jewish uses of days of the week identified a day not with a name, and certainly not with our names, because of of course, our names of the days of the week in English are derived largely from pagan and astrological sources, which would have had no relevance to the ancient Jews uh. And instead they identified days of the week with numbers, so this would be something like three in the Sabbath, so you would like sort of count from the Sabbath day, but then from here. In the subsequent centuries, this way of reckoning days of the week appears to show up in other types of literature, such as Greek literature of the first century CE, but then again mostly in Jewish or Jewish influence texts, for example, the Books of the New Testament. These are books written in Greek, but they're influenced by by Jewish religious ideas of course, and also in the works of Josephas these make references to days of the week, and it's a seven day week. So for example, the author of the Gospel of Mark uh, this is somebody who is writing in Greek sometime in the first century cees writing a story of the life of Jesus, and the author of the Gospel of Mark writes that the crucifixion of Jesus took place on quote preparation, which is the day before the Sabbath, and writes that the resurrection was on the quote first of the week. So I think I'm getting those right, but that would mean that the the author here is saying that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, because it's the day before the Sabbath, which is Saturday, and then the resurrection took place on a Sunday, which was the first day of the week after the Sabbath. So here we've got this evidence for the the Sabbath cycle as one of the main influences on the emergence of a seven day week that that we inherited and used throughout the world today. But another major influence seems to be the Roman planetary week. This is something we see evidence of in Rome and other parts of Italy, not just the city of Rome, but Rome and the Italian peninsula. Uh and this is well attested by the end of the first century CE. Now the Roman astrological week again, this is having seven days that are named after the planets or the god associated with the planets in the in the Roman system of astrology or astronomy. Because the quote planets they could observe. Again, a couple of these things are not actually planets, but they were the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. These are the moving objects in the sky that you can see without a telescope. And the way that the Roman astrological week was different was that it was not structured around a day of rest or a day of religious observance the way that the Jewish week was. Instead, it appears to have served a primarily astrological informative purpose, So it was sort of letting people know which planets reigned over had influence over which day of the cycle. Uh. And once again, this would not have any basis in real astronomical observations or patterns. It's not like there's anything physical you can say that associates the Sun with Sundays or the moon with Mondays. It's just that they just happened to pair them up that way. I don't know, unless we discover something really interesting that the Romans were onto that nobody's figured out since then. Well, I mean, if if Monday really was aligned with with the moon, we would surely see werewolf transformations on Mondays. And I've never heard of that being a thing, so clearly it doesn't check out. No, I'd say the vast majority of a wu's occur on Fridays and Saturdays, unless one is a real uh work based I don't know. Maybe maybe you're hollen when Monday comes along. That's a good point, of course, you've been working all weekend anyway, so I don't know send news to the emperor that the that the city has been sacked by verk beasts. But anyway, so their paper goes into great detail, but just in a very quick summary, it seems we see increasing numbers of references to use of a seven day week of some kind throughout the Roman Empire in the first couple of centuries c. And again this would be based on the Christian seven day week that is derived from the Sabbath week, but then also using this Roman astrological seven day week as a basis uh, sort of the fading away of the signific against of the eight day market week. And then in UH in the fourth century CE, you get some real moves, such as by a decree by Constantine that makes Sunday sort of the official sacred day of the empire. Of course, Constantine was the first Christian emperor of Rome. Uh. And so yeah, you see a big push towards standardization of the use of a seven day week. And it's in this relationship to the Christian significance of Sunday as the Lord's Day or the day of worship uh and UH and this being sort of standardized throughout the Roman Empire, especially in the third and fourth centuries CE. And this is the point where we can really start to say, Okay, here's the week that we inherited, and we can situate it well within history. So if your time machine has like Mondays, Wednesdays and Tuesdays on and so forth, UH, this might be as far back as you can really go this period with perfect accuracy. Also, you should probably reconsider the intra face for your time machine was depending on these these days. I just want to go five thousand Mondays back. Now. I mentioned in the first part of this series that one of the sources I've been reading, uh for for history of the seven day week was a U. C. Berkeley historian named David Hankin, who has written a book called The Week, A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that made us who we are. And so there have been several articles out and interviews with Hanken about this book that I've drawn from here. One of the things I read was this Eon magazine article by Hankin where he tries to talk about some of the reasons that the week became especially salient in his view in the nineteenth century, that there was something that happened roughly in the eighteen hundreds in the West that made the week suddenly a much more useful and important calendar unit than it had been in centuries before. Because before that, of course, people observed the week, you know, so in medieval Europe there was a week, but it might be more important for like tracking how long until the day you go to church or something. And one reason that that the week became more salient in the eighteen hundreds was the increasing proportion of society that made a living by wage labor, so working you know, some number of hours per week for some you know, a factory owner or in some kind of shop, instead of just people working on farms and things. And of course at this time it would have been common for wage laborers to work on Saturdays, but with Saturday representing the most common end of the seven day weekly cycle and the regular pay day, so if you have a day of the seven day cycle where the majority of people who are getting a paycheck are receiving that check, that's going to kind of change patterns of buying and consumption throughout the economy. So whatever people wanted to spend their paycheck on Saturday night might be a likely time for it. But by the early twentieth century there had been an increased push among wage laborers to have to have two day weekends instead of just Sunday off, and so especially in the nineteen thirties under under FDR, labor unions managed to make gains to sort of pressure it to to become the norm in the United States for full time workers to have a two day weekend, so you get Saturday and Sunday off. This was formalized, I think when the US passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in in ninety eight, which made a forty hour work week with a two day weekend the norm and the majority of American jobs. It's easy. This is another one of those examples that where it's easy to take it for granted and just think of like the weekend as a part of life itself. Uh, just imagining like you know, people living in in injuries past and then doing then doing something on the weekend. You know, it's just without thinking too closely about it, you can easily fall into that trap of just thinking that that's this is just the pattern of life, this is just how it works. No, the weekend the two day weekend is fairly new, and it's something that had to be fought for. Yeah. Hankin actually identifies a number of different influences that may have led to the increased salience of the week in the nineteenth century. One of them is the trend towards what he calls stock taking, I think is sort of accounting of one's affairs and and one's life. I guess this could be for business or personal reasons with the use of the seven day week in the nineteenth century, and this would be aided by actually the proliferation of mass market diary books with pages already formatted to reflect the days of the week, so like sort of the diary would arrive in your hands, not just with blank page is, but with sort of spaces for you to fill in what was going on each week or for the days of the week. And that earlier almanacs or diary books would have tended to to favor different kind of clindrical organizations. I never would have imagined that, but that was very interesting to me that like changes in just like printing of diary books could could play a role here. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting to think about again, just how these um at times even physical structures of physical layouts based on the week, the form of the week, these uh, these end up influencing the way we think about our lives, how we organize our lives, etcetera. So yeah, that's that's you can imagine how almanacs and diary books would have a huge impact because here it is, here is the week. Now fill in the week as you need to. He also points to schools as possibly playing a role in cementing weekly routines uh to the printing another printed product, and not just die arey books, but domestic manuals that would just say, you know, here's a good way to run a household, and it would specify certain tasks that you would do on certain days of the week. So it might say, you know, Mondays are good for washing and Tuesdays for ironing. Now that's a lot of ironing. Well, you don't have to fill the whole day with ironing. But ultimately, Hankin identifies as as maybe the main contributor to the increasing importance of the week as an organizing principle for life what he calls commercial entertainment, voluntary association, and print culture because he says that for increasingly urban populations people moving more towards city life and wage labor, it turned out that cycles of weeks were actually a useful way to schedule a busy, voluntary life. For example, if you're planning to see friends on a regular basis, you could just know that, you know, we get together every Thursday, which would allow for the meeting to happen on schedule without everybody checking to see if they had conflicting plans. And I he can argues that there's an interesting explanation for this. He says it was quote the impersonal character of urban life unquote that gave rise to the week as a primary scheduling device, because the week allowed people to quote coordinate recurring activities with others, including those they might not yet know. And I think this would be opposed to in in more rural life, the idea that socialization tends to be more kind of continuous and spontaneous rather than you know, scheduled recurring activities in an otherwise busy schedule. Yeah. Yeah, though, it is kind of funny how it sounds like it would be easier just to say, okay, well we're going to always do this on Thursday. Thursday is the day for this um. But I I know that that many of you out there probably have experience with with with this suation where you set that weekly expectation and then what happens when you get to Monday or Tuesday of that week. Someone's like, wake, actually, can we do it on Wednesday this week instead? I have a thing, what if we did it on Friday? No, Thursday is the day we decided that's why we have this week? And how many of those are caused by either people working outside of work hours or people just not wanting to go out and not wanting to admit it. Well, I mean it's in my opinion opinion, it's you know, it's fine if you don't want to go out, it's fine even if you want to work instead, But then don't don't bump around the the the the the recurring schedule just because because you've decided to work a little extra that day. I don't know, I'm uh like, like I said, this is I think one of those things where I like the principle of it, but it seems to break down somewhat, uh in my experience. But we know, of course that eventually the week becomes salient for basically everybody in America because it's not just like city dwellers who's whose weeks are filled with lots of different kinds of scheduled at activities, uh that that know about the week. Eventually, it seems like the week is something that's on everybody's mind. And uh, he mentions this. I want to read from a paragraph here, Hinkin writes. Quote, for those who lived in small towns and on farms, fewer activities distinguished one week day from the next. But even they would anticipate the arrival of the weekly mail, apportion the reading of the newspaper they received every seven days, or follow the schedules of a train or stage coach that passed through regularly on specific week days. As a result, generations of Americans became disciplined to the rhythms of the week that it impinged only lightly on the lives of their ancestors. So I think this is an interesting argument that it's like, even if you're not living in a city and juggling a lot of uh, you know, scheduled activities on a recurring basis, you know, maybe you're just like working on a farm in the rural world. Eventually the highly scheduled nature of city life sort of stretches out through through media and through transportation infrastructure and and communications through mail and stuff into the rest of the country. Now, one thing I was wondering about is okay, though that what what is the direct evidence that people tended to become more conscious of weeks and week days, what day of the week it was instead of say, what day of the month it was in the nineteenth century. So to mention a few examples of this, he says that there is a change in trends that we can see left in what are called blank book diaries of the period. So, as we mentioned a minute ago, some diaries would of course have a pre printed organizing principle for your entries, but some diaries would just be blank pages. And he says that in these diaries, if you examine them, you can see a natural shift in the first half of the eighteen hundreds towards a preference for identifying which day of the week it was at the top of each entry, and suddenly a greater tendency to make error in identifying what date of the month it was instead of what day of the week it was and checking against my own experience. I feel like I'm still in this this new weekday mindset because you know, or I guess I would say that weekday consciousness dominates date consciousness in my thinking. I pretty much always know what day of the week it is, but I always have to look up the new miracle date unless it's Halloween or something. Yeah. Yeah, it's very very much dealing with a publication schedule, I think makes you think like this for sure, though I guess it would be different if you're if you had a publication to say, only came out on of every month, or you know, bi monthly publication or something. But but other pieces of evidence for the increasing weekday consciousness. He says, also in this period in the eighteen hundreds, if you examine the records of witness testimony during trials, UH, you will see a trend toward people having a stronger memory for what day of the week something happened rather than the date UH, and frequently citing recurring weekly routines as sort of the anchor memory that made them sure of which day what they're what they're saying the witnessed happened on. So I don't know maybe it was a Thursday, because that is when the mail wagon arrives. And he also says across this period, letters begin to show a greater preference for organizing recent memories by weeks instead of other time scales. So if you just you know, read large amounts of correspondence people talking about what's going on in their lives, they're they're more inclined to start saying, here's what happened last week or the week before that. Also, interestingly, Hancin talks about a few different examples of various powers and institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries trying to replace the seven day week with something else, and noting that that these attempts failed in places where the week was already the norm. Some business interests in the West in the late nineteenth century wanted to get rid of the seven day week because it caused problems in book keeping. You might think, well, what would those problems be? But uh so, think about it this way. The year does not subdivide cleanly into a whole number of weeks, So you have inconsistent numbers of weeks lining up into time units that are used for bookkeeping. In businesses like months or quarters or years, and this can cause confusion. For example, if you're trying to compare some performance metric between two months, but the metric you're looking at is calculated on Fridays, and then maybe you've got a month that has five Fridays, but the next month only has four, so you start having trouble comparing things evenly across these calendar units. Oh, that reminds me of at one point, we were owned by a company that did I guess we gotta like a pay We got our paycheck every couple of weeks, and so occasionally you would have that one magic month where you got three paychecks in a given month, and that one wouldn't have anything taken out of it for for benefits and so forth. That's the vague memory I have of it. Anyway, chit Ching, No, it's funny. You can actually google this. They're like people who do whole web pages that are just like, here are the months in two that have five Fridays. I'll get five paychecks. I mean, if you get a paycheck every week, thank thank now. He also notes that in the Soviet Union, I think this was in nine, the USSR tried to change the calendar, also to to change the number of days in a week and how weekends worked. I think the new system they put together was that there would be seventy two weeks of five days each in every year, and this would add up to like three and sixty days. And then it would also have these weird interruptions supplementing it, so you would have holidays which didn't fall on a day of the week, but instead interrupted the weekly cycle. So uh, not that they celebrated Halloween, but if you use Halloween as an example, imagine Halloween wasn't on any day of the week, but you could have a schedule that went like Friday, Saturday, Halloween, Sunday, Monday. The alleged benefit of this was that it would eliminate the inefficiency of factories sitting dormant on the weekends, so you know, because of your workers would always be on duty to work the machines that day. But it apparently proved unpopular and inconvenient because people didn't always have the same day off as their friends or family, and it had some other downsides, like, like you know, there are reasons it can sometimes be useful for production to have offline periods, right, like say, there's certain maintenance procedures that need to take place. Uh, sometimes the machines need to stop. Right. So the Soviet Union actually went through a couple of different attempts at different reckonings of weeks. But I think by like nineteen forty they just went back to the regular seven day week. But so it's interesting that at various points both capitalism and communism tried to kill the seven day week and they both failed. Yeah, I mean, once that that order is in place, once you've everything in your life has has become attuned to this artificial structure, Uh, it becomes resistant to change because again, think of all the elements that have gone into it that we've discussed. You know, they're they're religious, they're they're they're supernatural, they're also related to, uh to at times actual frequencies in the market. And then it just becomes the frequency of your life. Uh. So to imagine, you know, trying to shift away from that un you can imagine the resistance that would take place, um either outward or certainly inward. Like what if we were to suddenly switch now like this was the decree that came down. Now we're gonna have three sixty five one day weeks. Uh. That's that's that's how we're doing it. That's useful, That would would be useful even if there was some strong argument to be made for like you'd have imagine like having to think about your life and time in that manner. Well, even if you try to put together a system that's not absurd in that way, but would try to be an improvement on our system, such as one that's been proposed a number of times is um changing the calendar to have fixed weeks within the year, so that the same date in the year would always correlate with the same fixed day of the week. So for example, maybe January one would always be a Sunday, the second is always a Monday, and it just goes on like that. Of course, the problem is again that the number of days in a year does not cleanly divide into seven. So the proposed fixed to this is to have a couple of days at the end of the year that would be so called blank days. These are like neutral days that are no day of the week, and then it and then it starts over again at the beginning of the year with the with the fixed calendar Can you imagine that though? Can you imagine it living your life on a day that is that is not a day of the week. It's yeah, it would feel like, how am I supposed to think about that? What is life like on a blank day? It's probably it's like the purge or something. You would wake up to the sounds of the whole world screaming at once. Yeah. But anyway, I was reading about this proposal in an interview with David Hankin in an article in The Atlantic um and he gives a reasoning why he thinks this has never taken hold. For one thing, it would break religious weekly cycles, which Christians, Muslims and Jews tend to see as a matter of tradition. These these weeks are, in their view, an unbroken series going back into antiquity, and that it has some religious value. Uh. And so, of course, like trying to change the calendar could be could be taken as a as an affront to the religious traditions of the main religions in the Western world. And speaking of that article in the Atlantic, there's one thing that the author asks David Hankin, did the increasing consciousness of the weekly calendar as opposed to the day of the month or whatever in the nineteenth century, did it make people feel different? Did it make time feel different to people when they started thinking about it more in terms of weeks? And Hankins as well. It's really hard to prove this, but he has a he has a sense that yes, he thinks that increasing consciousness of the seven day time period did have an effect on people's perception of time, and that effect was that it made people feel like time was going by faster. So to read his quote, I do think that when we are more attuned to the cycle, because it's shorter than a month, it feels like time moves much more quickly. When our Mondays are different from our Tuesdays and our Wednesdays, it does kind of feel like, all of a sudden, it's Monday again. You can see in nineteenth century diary entries that more and more often people describe this feeling by referring to how another week has come and gone. Which is funny because as soon as I read that phrase, another week has come and go on, that sounds like something extracted directly from like a Victorian letter or something. But but yeah, that's interesting. I wonder what you think about that if you organize more of your life along the schedule of the seven day week, does it feel like your life is happening faster than if you don't. I don't know. You know, it's because you also hear people saying the same thing about months and years, where they'll say things like, oh, man, March just flew by, didn't it It just seemed like it was no time at all? Or is it really Christmas again? It's we just did Christmas, now it's Christmas again. Um. So I'm I'm not not sure if I mean, I believe the author here, but um. But on the other hand, I don't know if it completely matches up with with my experience and my experience of hearing other people talk about the passage of time. I guess we're so conscious of weeks we don't really have anything to compare it to. We like, we can't remember what the passage of time felt like in the part of our lives where we didn't experience weeks. Yeah, I would say when you think outside of cat like, if you're going to actually think about things that are not cleanly divided by by by months and weeks and days, you know, I might think about the seasons, and sometimes that gets a little harder to think about, Like if you think about, well, when did when did winter actually begin for me and this part in this part of the world in which I live, and when does it seem like it is going to end? Or when did it end? And then when did it start again? And so forth. Good, we seem to have a certain fluctuation here in Atlanta. But I guess when I start thinking about that, maybe it becomes a little murkier. But you know, you begin to feel like it feels like it's always been winter. Well, of course we get the standard time perception paradox, right that has come up on the show many times before, which is that in general, things that feel like they're going on for a long time in the moment vanished to a point in memory, and things that feel like they're gone in a flash in the moment tend to expand in memory. A big example seasonally that I think about is um summers. When I was a kid, You know, summers off from school. It's like, when you're in it, it feels like the summer is over in an instant, you just have to go right back to school. But in my memory, the summers seem infinite. Yeah they yeah, they really did. Yeah, there's and granted school school summers have have gotten shorter, but the way they felt versus the way they seem now like, it's it's more than can be accounted for just by h adding or subtracting even whole month of the days. It reminds me of that that short story, though the woman had been inspired. Kubrick's Ai movie had the title super Toys Last All Summer Long, which I always really like that title because you know it it implies the summers of childhood and like you said, they're kind of infinite nature. Well, and to come back to weeks, I think one way in which the summer experience when I was a kid was different was that, of course, during the school year, I'm highly aware of what day of the week it was, and then the summer weeks didn't matter anymore. That's another thing, because that, yeah, I do remember more of a wide open summer situation when I was a kid, but as a parent, like we're more like, nope, this this this week, we're doing this camp, and it definitely has a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, situations. Some of those days are pool days, some of those days are pizza party days. It's all, it's all in the schedule. You know. There was one more thing I was thinking about getting into that is a a proposed neurological basis for UH for the seven day a week. But but maybe I'm gonna save that for our listener Mail episode on the following Monday, because we got a good message from a listener about it. Excellent. Well, on that note, if you have thoughts on this topic that we've covered these last three episodes the seven day Week, UH, keep them coming right in. We'd love to hear from you. Everybody has some sort of connection to this. How do these How do the day's feel to you? How does the passage of the week feel to you? Um, anything we've discussed in these episodes is open game, So right in, we'd we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, well, this is how our week tends to go on Monday, we do listener Mail on Tuesday, a core episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind. On Wednesday, a short form artifact or monster fact episode. On Thursday, another episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Friday, we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. And then on Saturday we have a rerun. We have a Vault episode, followed by Sunday, which of course is the day we rest, the day we on our soul invict Us. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind Doctor. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.

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