David Henkin
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
David Henkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Whereas in fact, it's not just Kramer, it's all of us. I think we almost all have some sense of what a Tuesday feels like or what a Wednesday feels like. And it's mysterious, but my sense is that if you dig deep into it, it has to do with schedules and expectations of things. And the week as a scheduling device is what gives it that feeling.
Yeah, so when I began thinking about this, that was the only explanation that people could give. They would cite that example, which is, oh, on a four-day work week, you know, suddenly Tuesday feels like a Monday. Right. Or you take a vacation and suddenly your Friday feels like a Saturday, et cetera. So it all had to do with the work and rest cycle.
But sometimes when there wasn't the holiday, you still felt like today doesn't feel like a Wednesday. And you didn't quite know why. And so I think that what was really helpful for me in thinking about the week was to stop assuming that everything that the week does is generated by this cycle of work and rest.
Cycle work and rest is hugely important, but then there are these other things, typically like things about Tuesdays and Wednesdays that give it a feel that are not simply about how long we've worked since the last day we had off.
Partly why it would be really different is because if you didn't have the week, you probably would come up with units of time that are fractions of a month or fractions of a year. And because the week isn't, it kind of just stands alone. And so does this completely different kind of work for us?
One thing, Mike, that you mentioned that I think is interesting is that we don't only use the week to divide one day from another. We also use it to lump all the days together. Like I'm going to do this for a week or I'm going to look back on the week that I had. So we use it as a lumper as well as a splitter. So really, it does so many things in our mental map of the passing of time.
Right.
In the United States until the 20th century, Sunday was the only day of rest. So the idea of a weekend as being two days didn't really spread to most working people until the 20th century. And it was largely the result of union agitation and of the depression and crisis of underemployment. So before then, in the United States, the weekend was just Sunday.
So you could call it the weekend, but it wasn't as common an expression because you could simply refer to it Sunday, the Lord's Day, or the first day of the week.
So in the 19th century, middle class workers often had a half day on Saturday. Teachers often had a Saturday off. School children had Saturday off. So Saturday as an additional day off or partial day off was known to lots of people in the United States in the 19th century. Sometimes people also had Wednesday as a half day from school, for example.
So there was some sense of there being other times of the week that were not as... link to work. But it was not until the 20th century that it became the norm for people to have a Saturday as well as a Sunday. So I would say the 1930s would be crucial transition where Saturday became a day off for a majority of people in the United States.
The pandemic was interesting to me because all the comedy routines, all of the memes, all focused on Blur's Day, this notion that pandemic shutdown had unsettled our sense of our place in the weekly cycle. And my best explanation for it is that's just the cycle to which we're actually most attached. That's the one that requires our regular habits to perpetuate.
All other cycles could be linked to other things, especially day and night. You can just look outside if you want. But the week is a fragile thing.
If we don't have our regular seven-day habits, if we don't do the things that we're used to doing in the way that we're used to doing them, we get dislodged from our sense of time more generally, and the week is the best way of expressing that sense of disorientation. Because the weak is the thing that we're most, in some ways, attached to.
We're most worried about losing it because it depends on the frailty of human record keeping. But we're also most attached to it because it's the one that makes the difference to our lives. If you think today is the 16th and it turns out to be the 17th, it's probably not going to cause you much inconvenience or much consternation.
But if you think that today is Wednesday and it turns out to be Tuesday, it's firstly going to make you miss all kinds of appointments and do the wrong things, but it also is going to make you wonder whether you've just sort of lost track of time in some more fundamental way.
I think you do have to have that, and I think the pandemic shutdown showed us how attached we are to it. The threats to the week, I think, don't come from things like pandemic shutdowns. The threats to the week come, and they were in place much earlier, come from things like telecommuting. working from home, non-synchronized entertainment.
So for example, when I was a kid, a lot of what people thought was the feeling of Wednesday or Thursday had to do with what was on TV those days. So that's gone and it's gone except for sports. But scripted entertainment is now asynchronous and work is often asynchronous or just irregular patterns. So those are the things that might make the week either less necessary or less powerful.
We also don't need it as much as a scheduling device because our electronic calendars can hold
appointments in place for us without our relying on the regularity of a weekly of a weekly meeting so those are the things that threaten the week but i do think that you're right mike that uh we cling to the week because there's nothing else like it uh because it does encapsulate somehow our our sense of being in time and it because it reflects all the social arrangements that uh that shape our lives i do think the week is likely to
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