It's the weekend!
There was the time in my life when that actually meant something, specifically that I would get to have a couple of days where I didn't have to think about work.
That did change some 25 years ago when a couple of my employers started to have the expectation that I should have my phone available at all times in case they needed something. Or I had to wear a pager. Remember pagers?
These days I'm self-employed, but even so it's hard to find any time to just sit down and do absolutely nothing, at least for more than 30 minutes or an hour at a time.
It occurred to me today that with the way the word world is right now, "time to relax" is not something you can find anymore, it's something you have to make. Time off has to be a conscious decision, it's not something that anybody automatically gets anymore.
And, somehow, we are often assigned to the category of being losers if we're not invested in grinding at work every day of the year.
Not that long ago I was talking to somebody with a corporate tech job and explaining how my cousins in Denmark generally get six to seven weeks of paid vacation every year and that person's commentary was basically that "Europeans are really lazy".
I don't know when we reached this point where we almost have a slightly sick pride in the fact that we spend so many hours at work that we have time for nothing else. The irony of that is actually that we're proud of how many hours we work, far more so than how proud we are of how much work we actually get done.
One of the reasons I never worked out well in the corporate world was because when I went to work I expected to work while most people around me seemed to spend most of their time at work trying to figure out how to not work.
And so they would be at work for 60 hours a week but so many of those hours were spent standing around by the vending machines in the cafeteria talking about last week's episode of some TV show that was popular in the moment.
The actual volume of work completed was definitely not all that impressive.
Frankly, I would rather work intensely at 100% for a much shorter week and have time on my hands to do other stuff. Isn't that what the whole work/life balance thing is supposed to be about?
Thanks for stopping by and have a great Sunday!
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2026.10.18 02:08 PDT
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