Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for a vault episode. This is part three of
Speaker 1: our series on the seven day Week. This originally published
Speaker 1: March tenth. Here you go. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three
Speaker 1: of our series about the seven day week. If you
Speaker 1: haven't listened to the two previous parts, you should probably
Speaker 1: go do that first. This one will maybe make more
Speaker 1: sense if if you do that. But hey, if you
Speaker 1: want to, you know, fly by the proverbial seat of
Speaker 1: your pants, let's go for it. Here we are in
Speaker 1: part three. All right, well, you know, to kick things off,
Speaker 1: I thought, as a potential fun aside, I thought we
Speaker 1: might think about weeks on other planets. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: because if we're if we're going to have just a
Speaker 1: planet centric week based on solar days, so one complete
Speaker 1: rotation of said planet, then this is about how it
Speaker 1: all breaks down here on Earth. One week is a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty eight hours twenty four hour days. Seven
Speaker 1: of those makes sense simple math um. On Mercury, one
Speaker 1: week is one thousand, four hundred and eight hours or
Speaker 1: about fifty eight earth days. So on Mercury that it
Speaker 1: is a hard core t g if mentality, like by
Speaker 1: the time you get to the weekend you are ready
Speaker 1: to party exactly. And it's even worse on Venus. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know Venus is as a hell world. On Venus,
Speaker 1: one week is forty thousand, twenty four hours, or about
Speaker 1: one thousand, seven hundred and one earth days. Now, the
Speaker 1: really weird thing about Venus would be that I think
Speaker 1: it is the case that on Venus a day is
Speaker 1: actually longer than a year, meaning that it takes the
Speaker 1: planet Venus longer to rotate on its axis than it
Speaker 1: does to go entirely around the Sun. Right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that would mean that a week on Venus is actually
Speaker 1: more than seven years on Venus. Yeah, and again we're
Speaker 1: just taking the idea that you know, we have a
Speaker 1: solar day here on Earth. Well, complete rotation is a
Speaker 1: day on another planet, and therefore seven of those would
Speaker 1: make a week on any given planet. All right, now,
Speaker 1: you know we already touched on Earth head on out
Speaker 1: to Mars. The red planet has twenty five hour days,
Speaker 1: so it's not too far off. We're talking a hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five hour week. But then you go to Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Here you have ten hour days, so we're talking about
Speaker 1: a seventy hour week. Saturn eleven hour days, so that's
Speaker 1: pretty easy to calculate seventy seven hour weeks um. And
Speaker 1: then by the time we get to uh Uranus, we're
Speaker 1: talking we're looking at a seventeen hour days, so that's
Speaker 1: a hundred nineteen hour weeks, and on Neptune sixty hour
Speaker 1: days a hundred and twelve hour weeks. You know, this
Speaker 1: should all I think, drive home, how you know, nonsensical
Speaker 1: In many respects, the concept of a week or even
Speaker 1: a day is when you move off of Earth. Uh
Speaker 1: for instance, just looking at Mars, the lack of a
Speaker 1: quote leisurely orbiting moon, as the Planetary Society puts it,
Speaker 1: means that you you don't really have Martian months for example.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so the year on Mars doesn't really divide
Speaker 1: into manageable time units like our months, right, So when
Speaker 1: we come to like determining like what time it is,
Speaker 1: on Mars. Like that's that's ultimately a whole whole old
Speaker 1: different topic unto itself. Scientists defend to devise, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: different ways of thinking about time regarding another planet. Um.
Speaker 1: And of course you can imagine how how complicated this
Speaker 1: would become if you had ultimately had some sort of
Speaker 1: colonial system in place on another world. Actually, you know
Speaker 1: what I just realized. I realized I was thinking about
Speaker 1: the speed of the orbits of the moons of Mars
Speaker 1: entirely in the wrong direct action, right, because I was thinking, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've forgotten how long it takes some maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: takes some like months and months on on Earth to
Speaker 1: go around Mars one time, But no phobos orbits Mars
Speaker 1: like once every eight hours or something, Right, it's just
Speaker 1: whizzing around, yeah, not very leisurely. So it's all do
Speaker 1: you know, I guess a reminder to of just you know,
Speaker 1: so so many so much of our contemplations of time
Speaker 1: are based on again, as we discussed in the first episode,
Speaker 1: the the observable world, the observable cosmos, And you're not
Speaker 1: going to have the same a set of stuff in
Speaker 1: place on other worlds, or it's going to mean something different,
Speaker 1: such as how long it seems to take the sun
Speaker 1: to rise and then to set. So this, obviously this
Speaker 1: leads to the next logical point is that if you
Speaker 1: were to watch the video from the Ring movies and
Speaker 1: therefore invoke the wrath of of of of a strange
Speaker 1: VH tape based ghost, you would, of course have seven
Speaker 1: days left to live. Those seven days would be best
Speaker 1: spent on an off world colony, you know, preferably heading
Speaker 1: on over to uh to Venus. I think now, I
Speaker 1: think this came up when we're actually talking about this earlier,
Speaker 1: and Rob, you and I both forgot that. In the
Speaker 1: movie they explain why it takes seven days, because that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, how long the creepy ghost girls in the
Speaker 1: well or whatever. But but but Ye had to remind us,
Speaker 1: Seth had to remind us. But we both forgot that.
Speaker 1: And you had the most amazing theory about the origin
Speaker 1: of the seven day curse period in the Ring and
Speaker 1: it had to do with our childhood memories of Blockbuster video. Yes, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: I I I was thinking, okay, seven seven days? Why
Speaker 1: seven days? Seven is is not an unlucky number in
Speaker 1: Japanese culture. It seems like four would be more fitting
Speaker 1: for that if we were going to go that route.
Speaker 1: So what is it about seven? I was thinking, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's the seven day rental period, right, and because
Speaker 1: we know that that she likes working through VHS tapes,
Speaker 1: so maybe it has to do with the VHS rental cycle.
Speaker 1: Of course, what this got me wondering about is how
Speaker 1: come in the Ring movies nobody ever talks back on
Speaker 1: the phone, you know, so you get the phone calls
Speaker 1: like your cursed seven days. How come nobody ever just
Speaker 1: like tries to negotiate. Well, you know, sometimes they have
Speaker 1: to uh participate in a survey after the call for
Speaker 1: quality assurance purposes, right, So there is that. In reality,
Speaker 1: I think the Ring videotape would probably give rise to
Speaker 1: a subculture of of what what would you call them?
Speaker 1: Like curse baiting scam fighters, you know, like the people
Speaker 1: who played pranks on the people who do the I R. S.
Speaker 1: Scam phone calls, except they're scamming Samara. Yeah. Yeah. Though
Speaker 1: it is interesting when you compare the two because when
Speaker 1: in the fictional situation, we have an evil entity calling
Speaker 1: you and wishing you harm and uh, it's it's very
Speaker 1: much the same thing when you have somebody trying to
Speaker 1: run some sort of a phone scam like it's it's
Speaker 1: almost it's quite unsettling, like to to to be speaking
Speaker 1: to somebody and realize this is someone who wishes to
Speaker 1: do me great harm. You've won a free cruise, but
Speaker 1: you first you need to send us some iTunes gift cards. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But you know, this also makes
Speaker 1: me think that, Okay, if we have a technological ghost here,
Speaker 1: maybe two potentially well not not actually, but within within
Speaker 1: this argument looking to an artificial cycle of time and
Speaker 1: using that as a way to to judge some other act.
Speaker 1: It does make me think about like the back in
Speaker 1: the old days of watching television, Um, there was a
Speaker 1: set TV cycle and I'm not saying it would was
Speaker 1: actually to the point where like a heavy, heavy TV
Speaker 1: consumption would make you know what day of the week
Speaker 1: it was based on what was on television. But it
Speaker 1: was easy to sort of have that that line of
Speaker 1: thinking in your head, you know, like you know what
Speaker 1: what is supposed to come on on Mondays? You know
Speaker 1: what what is the Monday night entertainment versus the Tuesday
Speaker 1: night Uh, you know, the movie of the week sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Um you could you could imagine yourself leaning
Speaker 1: into that view the cosmos. And in a sense, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like ancient timekeeping. It's based on the observable universe.
Speaker 1: Only your observable universe is what's on the television screen.
Speaker 1: Is USA up all night? Yeah? You know what day
Speaker 1: it is? Then, Now, as delightful as all that that is,
Speaker 1: we do actually have more serious contemplations regarding the seven
Speaker 1: day week to get to here. Oh right, so I
Speaker 1: guess in this episode we're probably going to talk some
Speaker 1: more about the history of the seven day week, like
Speaker 1: where it comes from and how it has changed over time.
Speaker 1: There is one paper I came across that if you
Speaker 1: want a really, really good, detailed, scholarly deep dive on
Speaker 1: this issue, uh, I would recommend This is actually not
Speaker 1: a paper, sorry, This is a book chapter in a
Speaker 1: historical book by the academic publisher Bill called Calendars in
Speaker 1: the Making The Origins of Calendars from the Roman Empire
Speaker 1: to the Later Middle Ages published and this chapter is
Speaker 1: called the seven day Week in the Roman Empire Origins
Speaker 1: standardization into fusion. And this is by Ilaria Boultra Guini
Speaker 1: and Sasha Stern and both of these authors are scholars
Speaker 1: of Hebrew and Jewish studies at University College London. This
Speaker 1: is a really good, really detailed chapter, but it is
Speaker 1: sort of written for scholars, so it's good if you
Speaker 1: want maximal detail on on the origins of the Western
Speaker 1: seven day week. UH given basically our best picture of
Speaker 1: the evidence within the last year or so. But I
Speaker 1: just thought I would mention a few things from it
Speaker 1: that struck me as as interesting for the lay person. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, they acknowledge the same thing that we've mentioned
Speaker 1: several times now, which is that the the deep origins
Speaker 1: of the seven day week are poorly understood because we
Speaker 1: don't have a founding document really of the seven day
Speaker 1: week says here is where the week begins, and you know,
Speaker 1: and from here on out everybody will use it for this,
Speaker 1: that and the other. Instead, we have little tidbits of
Speaker 1: evidence from from literary sources here and there in antiquity,
Speaker 1: and occasionally from UH from arcol logical of finds that
Speaker 1: give evidence of people using some kind of seven day
Speaker 1: weekly schedule in the ancient Near East. But they these
Speaker 1: pieces of evidence are fragmentary and a lot of times
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly what broader cultural conclusions to draw
Speaker 1: from them. So, for example, we know that by the
Speaker 1: first few centuries c E. In the Roman Empire, people
Speaker 1: were at some level using seven day weeks, but we
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how far this practice goes back and
Speaker 1: what all of the exact inputs on it were. Now,
Speaker 1: in the previous episode, we talked about, uh, this weird
Speaker 1: scenario that has been noted by historians where there were
Speaker 1: multiple different kinds of weeks in the first few centuries
Speaker 1: the e of the Roman Empire, UH that had different
Speaker 1: numbers of days in them, which sounds terribly confusing. But so,
Speaker 1: for example, you had this eight day week that seemed
Speaker 1: related to commerce, so it's the eight day mark its cycle.
Speaker 1: But then you also had these seven day periods such
Speaker 1: as the seven day Roman astrological week, in which the
Speaker 1: days were named after gods or planets. And then also
Speaker 1: the seven day cycle of the Jewish Sabbath, which was
Speaker 1: acknowledged uh, certainly by Jews within the Roman Empire, but
Speaker 1: also by by other groups as well. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: had these had divination and religion playing a role, but
Speaker 1: you also had like the hard realities of commerce and
Speaker 1: the economy. But even you know, but none of these
Speaker 1: are are fixed, uh, you know, figures in a given
Speaker 1: world like these are things that will change over time
Speaker 1: and do right. And so there is one point in
Speaker 1: this book chapter where Boltu, Guini and Stern actually disagree
Speaker 1: with something that I think we got from one of
Speaker 1: our other sources, which was the book The Seven Day
Speaker 1: Circle by Avatar Zerubavel, which claimed that the the Jewish
Speaker 1: practice of observing a seven day cy goal with a
Speaker 1: with a day of rest traced back to Mesopotamian practices.
Speaker 1: But the authors of this paper actually say that despite
Speaker 1: what other authors have alleged, there's actually really no very
Speaker 1: good evidence tracing the seven day week back to ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian or Mesopotamian practices. We we ultimately don't know exactly
Speaker 1: where it comes from. Now this, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: explained some of the hesitancy you see to really nable
Speaker 1: us down in some of the other sources, like for instance,
Speaker 1: Fagin and aveni Um, who I acided in the first episode.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they were more hesitant to to put a
Speaker 1: specific origin on it. Yeah, So it seems like it's
Speaker 1: still very much a topic of of of of studying
Speaker 1: consideration at least. But we do, of course have literary
Speaker 1: evidence from the ancient world of places where some kind
Speaker 1: of seven day weekly cycle or referenced. Of course, the
Speaker 1: big one is UH is the Hebrew Bible making reference
Speaker 1: to the Sabbath. So we see the idea of a
Speaker 1: seven day week the days leading up to the Sabbath
Speaker 1: day in the Hebrew Bible. Though interestingly UH the authors
Speaker 1: of this of this book chapter claim that in the
Speaker 1: Hebrew Bible there are actually no events that are said
Speaker 1: to occur on specific days of the week in the
Speaker 1: Hebrew Bible itself. The dated events are dated by other methods,
Speaker 1: such as by by month or by year um. And
Speaker 1: this raises questions like they ask, okay, so it's clear
Speaker 1: that at some point Jews were observing a Sabbath day,
Speaker 1: But they say, for example, we don't know in the
Speaker 1: early periods if Sabbath observance was synchronized across different Jewish
Speaker 1: communities or did like local Jewish communities all have their
Speaker 1: own Sabbath cycles. But once we get closer in time
Speaker 1: to the Roman period, we do see Jewish sources making
Speaker 1: specific reference to two things occurring on certain days of
Speaker 1: the week, specifically on the Sabbath day. UH. So, for example,
Speaker 1: they referenced the Book of First Maccabee's, which is a
Speaker 1: text from the late second century b c. And this
Speaker 1: makes reference to something occurring on the Sabbath day. They
Speaker 1: also make reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are
Speaker 1: of course these fascinating documents from Jewish communities dating back
Speaker 1: to the second to first centuries b c. UH, And
Speaker 1: they say that the Dead Sea Scrolls in some cases
Speaker 1: make reference to a calendrical system. This was kind of confusing,
Speaker 1: but I think the way I understand it is they
Speaker 1: had a year that had a different number of days
Speaker 1: than our year. I think it was three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty four days, which unlike our year of three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty five point to five days or whatever. UH.
Speaker 1: That year would divide evenly into fifty two weeks, so
Speaker 1: you get a whole number of weeks within the year,
Speaker 1: and this would be for seven day weeks based around
Speaker 1: the observance of the Sabbath. But then they also point
Speaker 1: out that a a seven day Sabbath week is mentioned
Speaker 1: and observed within the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek
Speaker 1: version of the Hebrew Bible in in the Salt. But
Speaker 1: one question would be, okay, why the sudden appearance of
Speaker 1: these references to things happening on uh days of the
Speaker 1: week in Jewish literature from around the second century b CE.
Speaker 1: What happened around there? So to read from the authors,
Speaker 1: they write quote the second century b c. Invention of
Speaker 1: the seven day week is a time reckoning system, even
Speaker 1: if only theoretical or literary, may well have been related
Speaker 1: to the revival and promotion of the observance of the Sabbath,
Speaker 1: which is credited to the Maccabeean rebels of the one sixties,
Speaker 1: but was surely also shared and promoted by other Judean
Speaker 1: groups at the time, such as the communities described in
Speaker 1: the Kumran literature, and this would be the ones associated
Speaker 1: with the Dead Sea scrolls uh and may have percolated
Speaker 1: further onto the diaspora in Egypt, as the papyri above
Speaker 1: mentioned possibly suggest promotion of Sabbath observance in this period,
Speaker 1: may have elicited the conceptualization of the week as a
Speaker 1: recurring sequence of seven numbered days, and does a fundamental
Speaker 1: structure of time reckoning and calendars. Uh. So, Again, this
Speaker 1: is one thing where we have to sort of speculate.
Speaker 1: We don't know for sure, but the authors here are
Speaker 1: saying it's possible that we see this sort of weak
Speaker 1: consciousness emerging in Jews of the second century BC as
Speaker 1: part of a religious revival, a sort of gathering of
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for observance of the Sabbath as a as a
Speaker 1: religious practice that of but then, of course this could
Speaker 1: end up having other functions within people's lives. If you're
Speaker 1: observing uh, you know, a week leading up to the
Speaker 1: Sabbath that could serve other scheduling functions if practice for
Speaker 1: long enough. Though of course, they acknowledge that we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what role these week days played in in
Speaker 1: people's day to day lives early on. Um. But another
Speaker 1: thing that's important to mention is that the early Jewish
Speaker 1: uses of days of the week identified a day not
Speaker 1: with a name, and certainly not with our names, because
Speaker 1: of of course, our names of the days of the
Speaker 1: week in English are derived largely from pagan and astrological sources,
Speaker 1: which would have had no relevance to the ancient Jews uh.
Speaker 1: And instead they identified days of the week with numbers,
Speaker 1: so this would be something like three in the Sabbath,
Speaker 1: so you would like sort of count from the Sabbath day,
Speaker 1: but then from here. In the subsequent centuries, this way
Speaker 1: of reckoning days of the week appears to show up
Speaker 1: in other types of literature, such as Greek literature of
Speaker 1: the first century CE, but then again mostly in Jewish
Speaker 1: or Jewish influence texts, for example, the Books of the
Speaker 1: New Testament. These are books written in Greek, but they're
Speaker 1: influenced by by Jewish religious ideas of course, and also
Speaker 1: in the works of Josephas these make references to days
Speaker 1: of the week, and it's a seven day week. So
Speaker 1: for example, the author of the Gospel of Mark uh,
Speaker 1: this is somebody who is writing in Greek sometime in
Speaker 1: the first century cees writing a story of the life
Speaker 1: of Jesus, and the author of the Gospel of Mark
Speaker 1: writes that the crucifixion of Jesus took place on quote preparation,
Speaker 1: which is the day before the Sabbath, and writes that
Speaker 1: the resurrection was on the quote first of the week.
Speaker 1: So I think I'm getting those right, but that would
Speaker 1: mean that the the author here is saying that Jesus
Speaker 1: was crucified on a Friday, because it's the day before
Speaker 1: the Sabbath, which is Saturday, and then the resurrection took
Speaker 1: place on a Sunday, which was the first day of
Speaker 1: the week after the Sabbath. So here we've got this
Speaker 1: evidence for the the Sabbath cycle as one of the
Speaker 1: main influences on the emergence of a seven day week
Speaker 1: that that we inherited and used throughout the world today.
Speaker 1: But another major influence seems to be the Roman planetary week.
Speaker 1: This is something we see evidence of in Rome and
Speaker 1: other parts of Italy, not just the city of Rome,
Speaker 1: but Rome and the Italian peninsula. Uh and this is
Speaker 1: well attested by the end of the first century CE.
Speaker 1: Now the Roman astrological week again, this is having seven
Speaker 1: days that are named after the planets or the god
Speaker 1: associated with the planets in the in the Roman system
Speaker 1: of astrology or astronomy. Because the quote planets they could observe. Again,
Speaker 1: a couple of these things are not actually planets, but
Speaker 1: they were the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,
Speaker 1: and Saturn. These are the moving objects in the sky
Speaker 1: that you can see without a telescope. And the way
Speaker 1: that the Roman astrological week was different was that it
Speaker 1: was not structured around a day of rest or a
Speaker 1: day of religious observance the way that the Jewish week was. Instead,
Speaker 1: it appears to have served a primarily astrological informative purpose,
Speaker 1: So it was sort of letting people know which planets
Speaker 1: reigned over had influence over which day of the cycle. Uh.
Speaker 1: And once again, this would not have any basis in
Speaker 1: real astronomical observations or patterns. It's not like there's anything
Speaker 1: physical you can say that associates the Sun with Sundays
Speaker 1: or the moon with Mondays. It's just that they just
Speaker 1: happened to pair them up that way. I don't know,
Speaker 1: unless we discover something really interesting that the Romans were
Speaker 1: onto that nobody's figured out since then. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: if if Monday really was aligned with with the moon,
Speaker 1: we would surely see werewolf transformations on Mondays. And I've
Speaker 1: never heard of that being a thing, so clearly it
Speaker 1: doesn't check out. No, I'd say the vast majority of
Speaker 1: a wu's occur on Fridays and Saturdays, unless one is
Speaker 1: a real uh work based I don't know. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: you're hollen when Monday comes along. That's a good point,
Speaker 1: of course, you've been working all weekend anyway, so I
Speaker 1: don't know send news to the emperor that the that
Speaker 1: the city has been sacked by verk beasts. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so their paper goes into great detail, but just in
Speaker 1: a very quick summary, it seems we see increasing numbers
Speaker 1: of references to use of a seven day week of
Speaker 1: some kind throughout the Roman Empire in the first couple
Speaker 1: of centuries c. And again this would be based on
Speaker 1: the Christian seven day week that is derived from the
Speaker 1: Sabbath week, but then also using this Roman astrological seven
Speaker 1: day week as a basis uh, sort of the fading
Speaker 1: away of the signific against of the eight day market week.
Speaker 1: And then in UH in the fourth century CE, you
Speaker 1: get some real moves, such as by a decree by
Speaker 1: Constantine that makes Sunday sort of the official sacred day
Speaker 1: of the empire. Of course, Constantine was the first Christian
Speaker 1: emperor of Rome. Uh. And so yeah, you see a
Speaker 1: big push towards standardization of the use of a seven
Speaker 1: day week. And it's in this relationship to the Christian
Speaker 1: significance of Sunday as the Lord's Day or the day
Speaker 1: of worship uh and UH and this being sort of
Speaker 1: standardized throughout the Roman Empire, especially in the third and
Speaker 1: fourth centuries CE. And this is the point where we
Speaker 1: can really start to say, Okay, here's the week that
Speaker 1: we inherited, and we can situate it well within history.
Speaker 1: So if your time machine has like Mondays, Wednesdays and
Speaker 1: Tuesdays on and so forth, UH, this might be as
Speaker 1: far back as you can really go this period with
Speaker 1: perfect accuracy. Also, you should probably reconsider the intra face
Speaker 1: for your time machine was depending on these these days.
Speaker 1: I just want to go five thousand Mondays back. Now.
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the first part of this series that
Speaker 1: one of the sources I've been reading, uh for for
Speaker 1: history of the seven day week was a U. C.
Speaker 1: Berkeley historian named David Hankin, who has written a book
Speaker 1: called The Week, A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that
Speaker 1: made us who we are. And so there have been
Speaker 1: several articles out and interviews with Hanken about this book
Speaker 1: that I've drawn from here. One of the things I
Speaker 1: read was this Eon magazine article by Hankin where he
Speaker 1: tries to talk about some of the reasons that the
Speaker 1: week became especially salient in his view in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: that there was something that happened roughly in the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds in the West that made the week suddenly a
Speaker 1: much more useful and important calendar unit than it had
Speaker 1: been in centuries before. Because before that, of course, people
Speaker 1: observed the week, you know, so in medieval Europe there
Speaker 1: was a week, but it might be more important for
Speaker 1: like tracking how long until the day you go to
Speaker 1: church or something. And one reason that that the week
Speaker 1: became more salient in the eighteen hundreds was the increasing
Speaker 1: proportion of society that made a living by wage labor,
Speaker 1: so working you know, some number of hours per week
Speaker 1: for some you know, a factory owner or in some
Speaker 1: kind of shop, instead of just people working on farms
Speaker 1: and things. And of course at this time it would
Speaker 1: have been common for wage laborers to work on Saturdays,
Speaker 1: but with Saturday representing the most common end of the
Speaker 1: seven day weekly cycle and the regular pay day, so
Speaker 1: if you have a day of the seven day cycle
Speaker 1: where the majority of people who are getting a paycheck
Speaker 1: are receiving that check, that's going to kind of change
Speaker 1: patterns of buying and consumption throughout the economy. So whatever
Speaker 1: people wanted to spend their paycheck on Saturday night might
Speaker 1: be a likely time for it. But by the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century there had been an increased push among wage
Speaker 1: laborers to have to have two day weekends instead of
Speaker 1: just Sunday off, and so especially in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: under under FDR, labor unions managed to make gains to
Speaker 1: sort of pressure it to to become the norm in
Speaker 1: the United States for full time workers to have a
Speaker 1: two day weekend, so you get Saturday and Sunday off.
Speaker 1: This was formalized, I think when the US passed the
Speaker 1: Fair Labor Standards Act in in ninety eight, which made
Speaker 1: a forty hour work week with a two day weekend
Speaker 1: the norm and the majority of American jobs. It's easy.
Speaker 1: This is another one of those examples that where it's
Speaker 1: easy to take it for granted and just think of
Speaker 1: like the weekend as a part of life itself. Uh,
Speaker 1: just imagining like you know, people living in in injuries
Speaker 1: past and then doing then doing something on the weekend.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just without thinking too closely about it,
Speaker 1: you can easily fall into that trap of just thinking
Speaker 1: that that's this is just the pattern of life, this
Speaker 1: is just how it works. No, the weekend the two
Speaker 1: day weekend is fairly new, and it's something that had
Speaker 1: to be fought for. Yeah. Hankin actually identifies a number
Speaker 1: of different influences that may have led to the increased
Speaker 1: salience of the week in the nineteenth century. One of
Speaker 1: them is the trend towards what he calls stock taking,
Speaker 1: I think is sort of accounting of one's affairs and
Speaker 1: and one's life. I guess this could be for business
Speaker 1: or personal reasons with the use of the seven day
Speaker 1: week in the nineteenth century, and this would be aided
Speaker 1: by actually the proliferation of mass market diary books with
Speaker 1: pages already formatted to reflect the days of the week,
Speaker 1: so like sort of the diary would arrive in your hands,
Speaker 1: not just with blank page is, but with sort of
Speaker 1: spaces for you to fill in what was going on
Speaker 1: each week or for the days of the week. And
Speaker 1: that earlier almanacs or diary books would have tended to
Speaker 1: to favor different kind of clindrical organizations. I never would
Speaker 1: have imagined that, but that was very interesting to me
Speaker 1: that like changes in just like printing of diary books
Speaker 1: could could play a role here. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: interesting to think about again, just how these um at
Speaker 1: times even physical structures of physical layouts based on the week,
Speaker 1: the form of the week, these uh, these end up
Speaker 1: influencing the way we think about our lives, how we
Speaker 1: organize our lives, etcetera. So yeah, that's that's you can
Speaker 1: imagine how almanacs and diary books would have a huge
Speaker 1: impact because here it is, here is the week. Now
Speaker 1: fill in the week as you need to. He also
Speaker 1: points to schools as possibly playing a role in cementing
Speaker 1: weekly routines uh to the printing another printed product, and
Speaker 1: not just die arey books, but domestic manuals that would
Speaker 1: just say, you know, here's a good way to run
Speaker 1: a household, and it would specify certain tasks that you
Speaker 1: would do on certain days of the week. So it
Speaker 1: might say, you know, Mondays are good for washing and
Speaker 1: Tuesdays for ironing. Now that's a lot of ironing. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't have to fill the whole day with ironing.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, Hankin identifies as as maybe the main contributor
Speaker 1: to the increasing importance of the week as an organizing
Speaker 1: principle for life what he calls commercial entertainment, voluntary association,
Speaker 1: and print culture because he says that for increasingly urban
Speaker 1: populations people moving more towards city life and wage labor,
Speaker 1: it turned out that cycles of weeks were actually a
Speaker 1: useful way to schedule a busy, voluntary life. For example,
Speaker 1: if you're planning to see friends on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: you could just know that, you know, we get together
Speaker 1: every Thursday, which would allow for the meeting to happen
Speaker 1: on schedule without everybody checking to see if they had
Speaker 1: conflicting plans. And I he can argues that there's an
Speaker 1: interesting explanation for this. He says it was quote the
Speaker 1: impersonal character of urban life unquote that gave rise to
Speaker 1: the week as a primary scheduling device, because the week
Speaker 1: allowed people to quote coordinate recurring activities with others, including
Speaker 1: those they might not yet know. And I think this
Speaker 1: would be opposed to in in more rural life, the
Speaker 1: idea that socialization tends to be more kind of continuous
Speaker 1: and spontaneous rather than you know, scheduled recurring activities in
Speaker 1: an otherwise busy schedule. Yeah. Yeah, though, it is kind
Speaker 1: of funny how it sounds like it would be easier
Speaker 1: just to say, okay, well we're going to always do
Speaker 1: this on Thursday. Thursday is the day for this um.
Speaker 1: But I I know that that many of you out
Speaker 1: there probably have experience with with with this suation where
Speaker 1: you set that weekly expectation and then what happens when
Speaker 1: you get to Monday or Tuesday of that week. Someone's like, wake, actually,
Speaker 1: can we do it on Wednesday this week instead? I
Speaker 1: have a thing, what if we did it on Friday? No,
Speaker 1: Thursday is the day we decided that's why we have
Speaker 1: this week? And how many of those are caused by
Speaker 1: either people working outside of work hours or people just
Speaker 1: not wanting to go out and not wanting to admit it. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's in my opinion opinion, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's fine if you don't want to go out, it's
Speaker 1: fine even if you want to work instead, But then
Speaker 1: don't don't bump around the the the the the recurring
Speaker 1: schedule just because because you've decided to work a little
Speaker 1: extra that day. I don't know, I'm uh like, like
Speaker 1: I said, this is I think one of those things
Speaker 1: where I like the principle of it, but it seems
Speaker 1: to break down somewhat, uh in my experience. But we know,
Speaker 1: of course that eventually the week becomes salient for basically
Speaker 1: everybody in America because it's not just like city dwellers
Speaker 1: who's whose weeks are filled with lots of different kinds
Speaker 1: of scheduled at activities, uh that that know about the week. Eventually,
Speaker 1: it seems like the week is something that's on everybody's mind.
Speaker 1: And uh, he mentions this. I want to read from
Speaker 1: a paragraph here, Hinkin writes. Quote, for those who lived
Speaker 1: in small towns and on farms, fewer activities distinguished one
Speaker 1: week day from the next. But even they would anticipate
Speaker 1: the arrival of the weekly mail, apportion the reading of
Speaker 1: the newspaper they received every seven days, or follow the
Speaker 1: schedules of a train or stage coach that passed through
Speaker 1: regularly on specific week days. As a result, generations of
Speaker 1: Americans became disciplined to the rhythms of the week that
Speaker 1: it impinged only lightly on the lives of their ancestors.
Speaker 1: So I think this is an interesting argument that it's like,
Speaker 1: even if you're not living in a city and juggling
Speaker 1: a lot of uh, you know, scheduled activities on a
Speaker 1: recurring basis, you know, maybe you're just like working on
Speaker 1: a farm in the rural world. Eventually the highly scheduled
Speaker 1: nature of city life sort of stretches out through through
Speaker 1: media and through transportation infrastructure and and communications through mail
Speaker 1: and stuff into the rest of the country. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing I was wondering about is okay, though that what
Speaker 1: what is the direct evidence that people tended to become
Speaker 1: more conscious of weeks and week days, what day of
Speaker 1: the week it was instead of say, what day of
Speaker 1: the month it was in the nineteenth century. So to
Speaker 1: mention a few examples of this, he says that there
Speaker 1: is a change in trends that we can see left
Speaker 1: in what are called blank book diaries of the period. So,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned a minute ago, some diaries would of
Speaker 1: course have a pre printed organizing principle for your entries,
Speaker 1: but some diaries would just be blank pages. And he
Speaker 1: says that in these diaries, if you examine them, you
Speaker 1: can see a natural shift in the first half of
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds towards a preference for identifying which day
Speaker 1: of the week it was at the top of each entry,
Speaker 1: and suddenly a greater tendency to make error in identifying
Speaker 1: what date of the month it was instead of what
Speaker 1: day of the week it was and checking against my
Speaker 1: own experience. I feel like I'm still in this this
Speaker 1: new weekday mindset because you know, or I guess I
Speaker 1: would say that weekday consciousness dominates date consciousness in my thinking.
Speaker 1: I pretty much always know what day of the week
Speaker 1: it is, but I always have to look up the
Speaker 1: new miracle date unless it's Halloween or something. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very very much dealing with a publication schedule, I
Speaker 1: think makes you think like this for sure, though I
Speaker 1: guess it would be different if you're if you had
Speaker 1: a publication to say, only came out on of every month,
Speaker 1: or you know, bi monthly publication or something. But but
Speaker 1: other pieces of evidence for the increasing weekday consciousness. He says,
Speaker 1: also in this period in the eighteen hundreds, if you
Speaker 1: examine the records of witness testimony during trials, UH, you
Speaker 1: will see a trend toward people having a stronger memory
Speaker 1: for what day of the week something happened rather than
Speaker 1: the date UH, and frequently citing recurring weekly routines as
Speaker 1: sort of the anchor memory that made them sure of
Speaker 1: which day what they're what they're saying the witnessed happened on.
Speaker 1: So I don't know maybe it was a Thursday, because
Speaker 1: that is when the mail wagon arrives. And he also
Speaker 1: says across this period, letters begin to show a greater
Speaker 1: preference for organizing recent memories by weeks instead of other
Speaker 1: time scales. So if you just you know, read large
Speaker 1: amounts of correspondence people talking about what's going on in
Speaker 1: their lives, they're they're more inclined to start saying, here's
Speaker 1: what happened last week or the week before that. Also, interestingly,
Speaker 1: Hancin talks about a few different examples of various powers
Speaker 1: and institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Speaker 1: trying to replace the seven day week with something else,
Speaker 1: and noting that that these attempts failed in places where
Speaker 1: the week was already the norm. Some business interests in
Speaker 1: the West in the late nineteenth century wanted to get
Speaker 1: rid of the seven day week because it caused problems
Speaker 1: in book keeping. You might think, well, what would those
Speaker 1: problems be? But uh so, think about it this way.
Speaker 1: The year does not subdivide cleanly into a whole number
Speaker 1: of weeks, So you have inconsistent numbers of weeks lining
Speaker 1: up into time units that are used for bookkeeping. In
Speaker 1: businesses like months or quarters or years, and this can
Speaker 1: cause confusion. For example, if you're trying to compare some
Speaker 1: performance metric between two months, but the metric you're looking
Speaker 1: at is calculated on Fridays, and then maybe you've got
Speaker 1: a month that has five Fridays, but the next month
Speaker 1: only has four, so you start having trouble comparing things
Speaker 1: evenly across these calendar units. Oh, that reminds me of
Speaker 1: at one point, we were owned by a company that
Speaker 1: did I guess we gotta like a pay We got
Speaker 1: our paycheck every couple of weeks, and so occasionally you
Speaker 1: would have that one magic month where you got three
Speaker 1: paychecks in a given month, and that one wouldn't have
Speaker 1: anything taken out of it for for benefits and so forth.
Speaker 1: That's the vague memory I have of it. Anyway, chit Ching, No,
Speaker 1: it's funny. You can actually google this. They're like people
Speaker 1: who do whole web pages that are just like, here
Speaker 1: are the months in two that have five Fridays. I'll
Speaker 1: get five paychecks. I mean, if you get a paycheck
Speaker 1: every week, thank thank now. He also notes that in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, I think this was in nine, the
Speaker 1: USSR tried to change the calendar, also to to change
Speaker 1: the number of days in a week and how weekends worked.
Speaker 1: I think the new system they put together was that
Speaker 1: there would be seventy two weeks of five days each
Speaker 1: in every year, and this would add up to like
Speaker 1: three and sixty days. And then it would also have
Speaker 1: these weird interruptions supplementing it, so you would have holidays
Speaker 1: which didn't fall on a day of the week, but
Speaker 1: instead interrupted the weekly cycle. So uh, not that they
Speaker 1: celebrated Halloween, but if you use Halloween as an example,
Speaker 1: imagine Halloween wasn't on any day of the week, but
Speaker 1: you could have a schedule that went like Friday, Saturday, Halloween, Sunday, Monday.
Speaker 1: The alleged benefit of this was that it would eliminate
Speaker 1: the inefficiency of factories sitting dormant on the weekends, so
Speaker 1: you know, because of your workers would always be on
Speaker 1: duty to work the machines that day. But it apparently
Speaker 1: proved unpopular and inconvenient because people didn't always have the
Speaker 1: same day off as their friends or family, and it
Speaker 1: had some other downsides, like, like you know, there are
Speaker 1: reasons it can sometimes be useful for production to have
Speaker 1: offline periods, right, like say, there's certain maintenance procedures that
Speaker 1: need to take place. Uh, sometimes the machines need to stop. Right.
Speaker 1: So the Soviet Union actually went through a couple of
Speaker 1: different attempts at different reckonings of weeks. But I think
Speaker 1: by like nineteen forty they just went back to the
Speaker 1: regular seven day week. But so it's interesting that at
Speaker 1: various points both capitalism and communism tried to kill the
Speaker 1: seven day week and they both failed. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: once that that order is in place, once you've everything
Speaker 1: in your life has has become attuned to this artificial structure, Uh,
Speaker 1: it becomes resistant to change because again, think of all
Speaker 1: the elements that have gone into it that we've discussed.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're religious, they're they're they're supernatural, they're
Speaker 1: also related to, uh to at times actual frequencies in
Speaker 1: the market. And then it just becomes the frequency of
Speaker 1: your life. Uh. So to imagine, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: shift away from that un you can imagine the resistance
Speaker 1: that would take place, um either outward or certainly inward.
Speaker 1: Like what if we were to suddenly switch now like
Speaker 1: this was the decree that came down. Now we're gonna
Speaker 1: have three sixty five one day weeks. Uh. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's how we're doing it. That's useful, That would would
Speaker 1: be useful even if there was some strong argument to
Speaker 1: be made for like you'd have imagine like having to
Speaker 1: think about your life and time in that manner. Well,
Speaker 1: even if you try to put together a system that's
Speaker 1: not absurd in that way, but would try to be
Speaker 1: an improvement on our system, such as one that's been
Speaker 1: proposed a number of times is um changing the calendar
Speaker 1: to have fixed weeks within the year, so that the
Speaker 1: same date in the year would always correlate with the
Speaker 1: same fixed day of the week. So for example, maybe
Speaker 1: January one would always be a Sunday, the second is
Speaker 1: always a Monday, and it just goes on like that.
Speaker 1: Of course, the problem is again that the number of
Speaker 1: days in a year does not cleanly divide into seven.
Speaker 1: So the proposed fixed to this is to have a
Speaker 1: couple of days at the end of the year that
Speaker 1: would be so called blank days. These are like neutral
Speaker 1: days that are no day of the week, and then
Speaker 1: it and then it starts over again at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the year with the with the fixed calendar Can
Speaker 1: you imagine that though? Can you imagine it living your
Speaker 1: life on a day that is that is not a
Speaker 1: day of the week. It's yeah, it would feel like,
Speaker 1: how am I supposed to think about that? What is
Speaker 1: life like on a blank day? It's probably it's like
Speaker 1: the purge or something. You would wake up to the
Speaker 1: sounds of the whole world screaming at once. Yeah. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I was reading about this proposal in an interview with
Speaker 1: David Hankin in an article in The Atlantic um and
Speaker 1: he gives a reasoning why he thinks this has never
Speaker 1: taken hold. For one thing, it would break religious weekly cycles,
Speaker 1: which Christians, Muslims and Jews tend to see as a
Speaker 1: matter of tradition. These these weeks are, in their view,
Speaker 1: an unbroken series going back into antiquity, and that it
Speaker 1: has some religious value. Uh. And so, of course, like
Speaker 1: trying to change the calendar could be could be taken
Speaker 1: as a as an affront to the religious traditions of
Speaker 1: the main religions in the Western world. And speaking of
Speaker 1: that article in the Atlantic, there's one thing that the
Speaker 1: author asks David Hankin, did the increasing consciousness of the
Speaker 1: weekly calendar as opposed to the day of the month
Speaker 1: or whatever in the nineteenth century, did it make people
Speaker 1: feel different? Did it make time feel different to people
Speaker 1: when they started thinking about it more in terms of weeks?
Speaker 1: And Hankins as well. It's really hard to prove this,
Speaker 1: but he has a he has a sense that yes,
Speaker 1: he thinks that increasing consciousness of the seven day time
Speaker 1: period did have an effect on people's perception of time,
Speaker 1: and that effect was that it made people feel like
Speaker 1: time was going by faster. So to read his quote,
Speaker 1: I do think that when we are more attuned to
Speaker 1: the cycle, because it's shorter than a month, it feels
Speaker 1: like time moves much more quickly. When our Mondays are
Speaker 1: different from our Tuesdays and our Wednesdays, it does kind
Speaker 1: of feel like, all of a sudden, it's Monday again.
Speaker 1: You can see in nineteenth century diary entries that more
Speaker 1: and more often people describe this feeling by referring to
Speaker 1: how another week has come and gone. Which is funny
Speaker 1: because as soon as I read that phrase, another week
Speaker 1: has come and go on, that sounds like something extracted
Speaker 1: directly from like a Victorian letter or something. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I wonder what you think about that if
Speaker 1: you organize more of your life along the schedule of
Speaker 1: the seven day week, does it feel like your life
Speaker 1: is happening faster than if you don't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, it's because you also hear people saying the
Speaker 1: same thing about months and years, where they'll say things like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: March just flew by, didn't it It just seemed like
Speaker 1: it was no time at all? Or is it really
Speaker 1: Christmas again? It's we just did Christmas, now it's Christmas again. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm not not sure if I mean, I
Speaker 1: believe the author here, but um. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it completely matches up with with
Speaker 1: my experience and my experience of hearing other people talk
Speaker 1: about the passage of time. I guess we're so conscious
Speaker 1: of weeks we don't really have anything to compare it to.
Speaker 1: We like, we can't remember what the passage of time
Speaker 1: felt like in the part of our lives where we
Speaker 1: didn't experience weeks. Yeah, I would say when you think
Speaker 1: outside of cat like, if you're going to actually think
Speaker 1: about things that are not cleanly divided by by by
Speaker 1: months and weeks and days, you know, I might think
Speaker 1: about the seasons, and sometimes that gets a little harder
Speaker 1: to think about, Like if you think about, well, when
Speaker 1: did when did winter actually begin for me and this
Speaker 1: part in this part of the world in which I live,
Speaker 1: and when does it seem like it is going to end?
Speaker 1: Or when did it end? And then when did it
Speaker 1: start again? And so forth. Good, we seem to have
Speaker 1: a certain fluctuation here in Atlanta. But I guess when
Speaker 1: I start thinking about that, maybe it becomes a little murkier.
Speaker 1: But you know, you begin to feel like it feels
Speaker 1: like it's always been winter. Well, of course we get
Speaker 1: the standard time perception paradox, right that has come up
Speaker 1: on the show many times before, which is that in general,
Speaker 1: things that feel like they're going on for a long
Speaker 1: time in the moment vanished to a point in memory,
Speaker 1: and things that feel like they're gone in a flash
Speaker 1: in the moment tend to expand in memory. A big
Speaker 1: example seasonally that I think about is um summers. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, You know, summers off from school.
Speaker 1: It's like, when you're in it, it feels like the
Speaker 1: summer is over in an instant, you just have to
Speaker 1: go right back to school. But in my memory, the
Speaker 1: summers seem infinite. Yeah they yeah, they really did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's and granted school school summers have have gotten shorter,
Speaker 1: but the way they felt versus the way they seem
Speaker 1: now like, it's it's more than can be accounted for
Speaker 1: just by h adding or subtracting even whole month of
Speaker 1: the days. It reminds me of that that short story,
Speaker 1: though the woman had been inspired. Kubrick's Ai movie had
Speaker 1: the title super Toys Last All Summer Long, which I
Speaker 1: always really like that title because you know it it
Speaker 1: implies the summers of childhood and like you said, they're
Speaker 1: kind of infinite nature. Well, and to come back to weeks,
Speaker 1: I think one way in which the summer experience when
Speaker 1: I was a kid was different was that, of course,
Speaker 1: during the school year, I'm highly aware of what day
Speaker 1: of the week it was, and then the summer weeks
Speaker 1: didn't matter anymore. That's another thing, because that, yeah, I
Speaker 1: do remember more of a wide open summer situation when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, but as a parent, like we're
Speaker 1: more like, nope, this this this week, we're doing this camp,
Speaker 1: and it definitely has a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, situations.
Speaker 1: Some of those days are pool days, some of those
Speaker 1: days are pizza party days. It's all, it's all in
Speaker 1: the schedule. You know. There was one more thing I
Speaker 1: was thinking about getting into that is a a proposed
Speaker 1: neurological basis for UH for the seven day a week.
Speaker 1: But but maybe I'm gonna save that for our listener
Speaker 1: Mail episode on the following Monday, because we got a
Speaker 1: good message from a listener about it. Excellent. Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, if you have thoughts on this topic that
Speaker 1: we've covered these last three episodes the seven day Week, UH,
Speaker 1: keep them coming right in. We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Everybody has some sort of connection to this. How do
Speaker 1: these How do the day's feel to you? How does
Speaker 1: the passage of the week feel to you? Um, anything
Speaker 1: we've discussed in these episodes is open game, So right in,
Speaker 1: we'd we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind, well, this is how our
Speaker 1: week tends to go on Monday, we do listener Mail
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, a core episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday, a short form artifact or monster fact episode.
Speaker 1: On Thursday, another episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Friday,
Speaker 1: we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set
Speaker 1: aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 1: And then on Saturday we have a rerun. We have
Speaker 1: a Vault episode, followed by Sunday, which of course is
Speaker 1: the day we rest, the day we on our soul
Speaker 1: invict Us. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at Stuff to Blow Your Mind Doctor. Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.