Christianity gets its seven day period from Judaism, and it may well hearken back to Babylonian astronomy (seven planets, including the sun (Sunday) and moon (Monday)). The Romans, on the other hand, had an eight-day week with market days every eighth day (ninth counting inclusively, hence their name nundinae). In the middle ages, market towns had market days on fixed days of the week, every week, providing a commercial rhythm that had to give some rise to weekly consciousness before the twentieth century.

while the seven day week is arbitrary, it is also worth noting that the French Revolution had experimented with a metric ten day week, which ended up being a total bust because laborers only got one week in ten of rest rather than one in seven.

Have this professor Henkin heard of the moon?

You'd have to go back nearly 2000 years, at the very least, to find a time when civilizations weren't living under the tyranny of time keeping devices. Here's a poem from 195AD Rome satirizing the tyranny of the sun dial: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days

Leaving civilization is probably your only option. Other than joining a handful of remote tribes, or living as a recluse, I don't think there's anyway to completely shield oneself from the tyranny.

> You could move somewhere rural, lower expenses, but then you are socially isolated to an extent.

I got more social interactions the first week I moved to my house built in the middle of nowhere eastern europe than in my 10 years in a western EU capital. Small communities are much more alive than gigantic ones. You do lose some convenience, but it's not as bad is it used to be, for exemple there is a 24/7 automated supermarket 10min from my middle of nowhere village, 5g everywhere, etc.

You guys get a weekend?

Rough data according to chatgpt: 165–175 countries: predominantly 5/2 15–25 countries: predominantly 6/1 ~5–15 countries: genuinely mixed / difficult to classify

It’s called society and it’s really hard to fight against. I’d suggest you look for a way to fit in that suits you.

"Really struggling with this question."

Many do, but there are also many unique solutions. Work part time. Home office. Live rural, but close to a railwail station that brings you to the city quickly. Limit your expenses, check what you really need. Do freelancing, where you often can decide when you will do the work, ..

Have a look at ERE. Don't get fooled by the snake oil sounding url. I ignored it for years because of that, but it's a sound framework to help you answer the question you are asking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker

https://earlyretirementextreme.com/

Society and your past decisions will put you on rails. You can get off them, but there will be sacrifices.

I will always gladly post this. Not because I think it's good advice or because I think Ran is a person to emulate, but because I think it encourages one to think differently about life, wants, needs, and responsibilities.

https://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html

Don't live for the weekend. Why 2 out of 7 days when you have another 5. Don't put off til the weekend. Don't put off til annual vacation. Don't put off til retirement. Live life every day.

As for each day, organize around living your life. For me, that means working a schedule from the other coast so I sleep when my body craves it, and not fighting it to be productive when I simply am running on reserves

> I’m not talking about starting your own company get rich quick scheme

You will be better off staying under the yoke and obeying your masters. If you think starting your own company is some "get rich quick scheme", it means they have trained you well in what are your proper limits.

Aren't these effectively the same thing? In order to get the benefits of living/working as a group/in a society, there needs to be common elements; aggregating by location/space and by time go hand in hand. If the farmers' market is in the park on Sundays, you can hardly expect to show up at a different time or place and still participate. Regularity, in time or place, is the most common and scalable way to coordinate. The way to avoid that is to remove the need to coordinate, but then, by definition, you are alone.

Sadly, as soon as you can conjure the concept of time and schedules, you will yourself end up under one, either self-imposed or imposed by others.

It will creep slowly on you and before you realize you will be late to do the laundry or whatnot.

Having a schedule and making so many things predictable and optimizable is just too advantageous to just not do it.

This can be done, and in major cities as well. You get a tent, and some fentanyl and just don't go to work anymore.

You know all that shit you feel compelled to buy? You know that house that's about 2000 to 3,000 square feet more than you need? And all that excess food you eat that turned you into a fat ass? That car you drive that is three feet too long and 15-50k more than you need to spend?

But yes, being anti consumerist, even to a mild extent, is "radical". In particular, alas, to the vast vast vast majority of mates

Oh is that not how you're living already?

From 1965 issue of Time:

> Union-shop steward, emerging from a meeting with management to face a group of workers: “Brothers, we’ve got it made. From now on, we will work only on Wednesdays.”

> Irritated voice from the crowd: “You mean EVERY Wednesday?”

I suspect it’s significantly older than that though.

My company picks up holiday policy from one of its dev center and applies to all other engineers who live in different cities. On my "vacation" I am the only one in myfamily who has day off; and when my kids have some holiday I have to work.

It is impossible to explain this to HR team. Sic.

If we are being even more pedantically correct about this:

1. The statement about months is kinda wrong. Solar months just happen because of the earths orbit around the sun, too, and the division by 12 is how many knuckles you can count on one hand by using your thumb.

Moon months exist, and there are 13 of them, from January to Undecember [Footnote: 1], or whatever you want to call them. But by happenstance if we talk about having a moon-month, we will probably be in a culture that uses a calendar that does not have a two-day weekend.

2. Seasons could be argued to be more complex than just sun-based on fixed yearly cycle. Whether four seasons for everyday life exist seems to depend on latitude, and is a bit counter-intuitive at the equator:

Based on solstices you would expect warm/cold/warm/cold, so twice as many seasons, per year, not half that many. Yet Quito or other cities seem to have rain dependent on yearly circulation effects, but constant temperatures. El Niño/La Niña would probably have at least as much of an effect and are of course not on strictest schedules in such areas, and perhaps make more sense for crop or disaster planning than solar years might.

But Southern Hemisphere does not use a reverse "Christmas is in summer" calendar[2]

---------------

Footnotes:

1: 11th month by name, but some Pope's birthdays reforms happened until we ended up with February at 28 days and no spring's start is the new year, etc.

2: Even if that was Christmas before the popes changed it and/or Christians like to feast when heathens brethren/converts did, simultaneously. And historically more plausible for a time of travel to do a census.

May I refer you to timecube?

https://www.timecube.net/

You’d have to convince a lot of religious people to give up the day of rest they’ve considered a religious obligation for thousands of years.

Very curious to understand the thinking behind this, why should the weekend be E and A? My first approach would be to have the weekend on D and E which would seem to be the end of the week.

It once came up whether my grandmother went to music festivals in her youth. Of course not, she said, they hadn't been invented yet! They didn't have electronic music, because they didn't have electronics. And nobody was playing guitar on stage for 12 hours. You could hold a short small concert in a hall, but you couldn't hold a big rave.

it wasn't much more than 50 years ago before being able to go to the ER to be saved in an emergency in the us was a right without having to show proof of payment/insurance.

a lot of what we take for granted are very recent things.

> With the shift to AI, it could happen.

You'll work more and they'll pocket the difference, as it's been the case for every advances in the last 50 years.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGj_oQ...

I'd be inclined to agree with you if every vacation I've ever taken hasn't left me less excited to come back to work.

And work all 3 weeks?

Nah, I'll keep my Friday's off.

We could all work 5 day/2day off, 4 weeks, and whatever was left at the end of the month? Time off.

The variability would be fun. Sometimes it would be a 5 day weekend even.

> Wyoming

Minnesota

One of my high school teachers couldn't give a ... rat's ass about unions and strikes and teachers had it pretty bad back then; they still do today. Not everyone drinks the communist kool aid sold today by Bernie Sanders and AOC in America. Some of us have already experienced firsthand the "benefits" of communism. By the way, while the work week in the US was only 5 days long, in communist Romania it was still 6 days long. Pupils went to school Saturdays. Though during the last years of communism some weeks of the month were shorter, only 5 days.

What year do you think it is

Didn't the Dutch East India Company go public in 1602?

Also, in ancient Rome, coinage with Caesar's face on it was traded above its bullion value. They'd kill 1/10th of your population repeatedly until you agreed to this (such was the origins of the word "decimation"), and then they'd buy their dinner from you with caesar-face coin and move on to the next village tomorrow. Now that you have some caesar-face coin, you have some incentive to continue upholding its inflated value, and the tax collectors will show up later and re-apply threats of violence to ensure that you continue to do so. That sounds like fiat currency to me.

Also, the federal reserve was established in 1913.

Dude, I'm all for framing the status quo as mutable, but maybe do a bit of research.

While there was legal slavery in some countries well into the second half of the 20th century, capitalism and workers' rights movements are definitely older than 100 years.

> Germany

The HRE for several hundred years could probably seen as a proto-Germany.

On a farm there's always work, and most were farming or similar back then.

An old farmer I know let me in on his trick: don't work so hard. He said young and inexperienced folks would work way too hard, ie put in too much effort, and get exhausted quickly. Instead lower the effort so it's sustainable. Move slower, don't lift near your max and so on.

In the past, a professional job might mean extended periods of travel by rail etc with little work to do. A small acreage farmer has to wait for plants to grow.

The advent of factories with limitless and constant demand for labor is a new development of the industrial revolution.

Jewish, Christian, and Islam have a Sabbath.

Not sure what anyone else did.