Take Back the Weekend
Episode Stats
Summary
Katrina Onstad shares how the idea of having two back-to-back days off from work came about, and how it has been challenged and subsequently eroded in the modern day. We then talk about how to take back your weekends, so that they feel more like they did when you were a kid.
Transcript
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Hey, this is Brett. It is Labor Day here in the United States. We're taking a break to spend time
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with our family, eat some hamburgers, celebrate the end of summer. So we're going to rebroadcast
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episode number 753, Take Back the Weekend. Hope you enjoy it. Hope you're having a great Labor
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Day. See you on Wednesday with a brand new episode. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition
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of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, do you ever get to feeling kind of down, dejected,
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and anxious come Sunday evening? People refer to this phenomenon as the Sunday night blues,
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and it's a common experience. You may have chalked it up to ruin the fact that your fun and restful
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weekend is over, and you have yet another work week ahead. But my guests would say that your
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Sunday night sadness may also be rooted in the feeling of regret, the regret you didn't put
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your weekend to good use, that it wasn't restful and fun, that it was instead busy, draining, and
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once again, a big letdown. Her name is Katrina Onstad, and she's the author of The Weekend Effect.
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Today, Katrina shares how the idea of the weekend, of having two back-to-back days off from work came
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about, how it's been challenged and subsequently eroded in the modern day. We then talk about how
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to take back your weekends, so that your invaluable Saturdays and Sundays feel more the way they did
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when you were a kid, filled with a sense of possibility. After the show's over, check out our
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show notes at aom.is slash weekend. All right, Katrina Onstad, welcome to the show.
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So you've got a book called The Weekend Effect, and this is all about the benefits of actually
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enjoying those two days that we get for a weekend and how to make the most of them.
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Curious, was there a moment in your own life, of life of weekends, where you realized, man,
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my weekends, they're not great. I could probably do these better.
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Well, it's funny now, post-COVID, right? Because, of course, The Weekend looked pretty different a few
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years ago when I wrote this book. So I'll dig back into the moment where the before times.
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And yeah, I was raising two kids, married, very busy work life, and we were packed. I think
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our calendars were like the calendars of CEOs, even though that's not exactly what we did
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professionally and certainly not what our kids were. But they were scheduled, we were scheduled.
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And my son on a Sunday night would sort of turn to me every Sunday and say, so was that it? Was
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that the weekend with this kind of disappointment as if we had withheld something from him? And it was
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kind of clear that the pace wasn't changing, that there was nothing kind of in the texture and the
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tone of the weekends that differentiated those two days from the other five days. And it was a problem.
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And I was really worried about, you know, losing this time as a family and also about my own rate
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of burnout, which was palpable. And, you know, a kind of sharpness and unhappiness was emerging that
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I think often happens with people in our overwhelmed lives. And I wanted to really take a look at it.
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Well, and that comment by your son, like, is that it? Was that the weekend? A lot of people
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experience that. In fact, there's like a name for this phenomenon, the Sunday blues,
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Yeah, it's actually something that, you know, there's been lots of surveys and research and
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people will actually report a negative feeling on Sunday night, like a kind of upcoming panic and
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about the week ahead and also a sense of regret that the weekend wasn't what they had hoped it would
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be. And I think that that's kind of a universal feeling. Like we know that it's supposed to be
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different. We know it's supposed to be set apart. And we remember probably, hopefully from our
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childhoods, we were lucky enough to have those kinds of weekends where we were free and we were
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kind of off the clock. And getting back to that feeling or being reminded of that feeling and not
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having it on a Sunday night is something I think we all kind of grieve.
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Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah. I remember my weekends as a kid compared to as now as an adult.
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Weekends, they often just feel like any other day, except the kids don't go to school.
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school. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That sense of kind of wonder and possibility and bottomless
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adventure, that Friday feeling you have when you're young, like that's the feeling I think
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we're all yearning for. Well, let's talk about the history of weekends because I think we take
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weekends for granted. Everyone listening to this podcast has lived in a world where there's always
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been weekends unless there's some 120-year-old person listening to this podcast. But it's a
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pretty recent idea that you get two back-to-back days of no work or school. So let's do like a
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crash course in the development of the weekend. Like when did we first start seeing this push where
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you would get some time off at the end of the work week just to do whatever you want?
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Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of a fascinating history and it's not an accident. It didn't just
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happen. People fought and people actually died for us to have these two days off, to have a reasonable
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relationship to our work. So really the idea of time changed with the industrial revolution. Okay,
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let's go back there where people went from what used to be called task time to clock time, right? So
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like before with work in an agrarian society, like if you'd have three cows to milk, the amount of time
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that would take you is three cows time, right? But then industrialization takes place and the clock
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changes time. Time becomes measurable, right? It's the beginning of data, right? So now you have 20
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minutes to milk three cows and you're paid for the time, not the task. So time gets commodified. And with
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the industrial revolution, of course, you know, workers' conditions and we have those Victorian images of
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Victorian factories with people, you know, starting in the dark and ending in the dark and limitless
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amounts of work in the service of these new factories and productivity, productivity, productivity,
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right? So organized labor kind of rises up out of that in the 19th and early 20th century as a
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response to this mass industrialization and this shifting relationship to time. And we see an era of
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protests. So the weekend is one of the victories of organized labor. So yeah, fighting for an eight
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hour day, that was the very beginning of the labor movement that fought for the weekend. The big event
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in Haymarket in Chicago in 1836, I hope I'm getting that right, was 76 rather, 30,000 people marched for an
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eight hour day. And, you know, bombs went off, police fire, police fired shots, eight people died. There
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was a court, you know, a massive trial. So like sacrifices were made, like blood was spilled. That
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was for the eight hour workday. The eight hour workday slid into the two day a week, the idea that people
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didn't need to work seven days a week and could get two days off back to back. And that of course is
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even farther back, rooted in the Sabbath, right? That, that idea that there needed to be one day
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a week, this kind of edict from God that like people didn't have to be indentured servants to
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the Pharaoh that's in the Bible, right? That, you know, the slaves were building granaries for the
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Pharaoh endlessly and needed a day off. So, you know, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these
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monotheistic religions have one day a week that's, that's supposed to be a break, you know, depending
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on which religion, of course, you know, that, that it's executed in different ways. But the idea that
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there is time where to tend to spiritual self, a self outside of work where one's identity isn't just
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tied to productivity, but expanded. So, you know, these things have kind of collided to give us those
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two particular days, the Saturday and the Sunday. But now, of course, things look quite different.
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Right. So, okay. So we have Saturday and Sunday. I think that was because there's basically was
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like, well, Jewish people, they're going to take Saturday off. Christian people, they're going to
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take Sunday off. So to accommodate, we'll just make it Saturday, Sunday is the weekend. Because
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there was a moment where there was like, the weekend was like Sunday, Monday, like Monday was
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the unofficial second weekend. Like people were supposed to go to work, but they were like, yeah,
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I prefer not to. Yeah. It's actually funny. There was a fake saint invented called Saint
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Monday. And in England, people would not show up on Monday and they'd say, I am honoring Saint
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Monday. This was not a real saint. And what they were is probably hungover. And Benjamin Franklin
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actually wrote about that and was very irate about the slovenly Monday holiday takers. So,
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yeah, eventually things kind of reverted and that Monday became part of the work week. But
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you're right. Like there was a long tradition of people just, if they got this, just the
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And then also you saw this movement as well after the labor movement where you saw some
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factory owners or company owners embrace the idea of a weekend because they thought, well,
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actually our employees are happier and they're more productive when they take those two days
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off. I think, I mean, Henry Ford is famous for, you know, paying a decent wage, but he's
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also, hey, you don't need to work all the time. So you can go enjoy yourself and buy cars.
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And for me, and they saw, they caught on the idea and they really bought into it.
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Yeah. I mean, that's a great example of that shift because it's true. Employers know that
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workers who are overworked are not great employees. People who are overworked and burnt out introduce
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more errors into the work that they do. They aren't more productive. And so it benefits workplaces
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to manage the spread of, of work hours. And yeah, Henry Ford realized that. And he needed
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his employees to not only be working reasonable hours, but to have time off to buy the products
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that they were making. Right. So it's like, I mean, it's a kind of tricky dance of capitalism,
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the idea of the weekend, because it is so tied to consumerism. So yes, on one hand, it's like
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very altruistic of him and, you know, other business leaders to give people time off, but
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also really benefits them to have consumers out in the world. Because when it was just
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a Sunday, then of course that's a true day for Christians anyway, like a true Sabbath and
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you're not supposed to be shopping. So give them the Saturday, they'll go buy the cars, you
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know? So, so you're right. Like this is, has been a long kind of evolution to get to where
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we are now. All right. So we, by the early 20th century, the weekend was established that
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this is a norm that you do, but then towards the end of the 20th century, you start seeing
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the weekend wane. So what are the numbers say? Like, you know, how many, like what's the state
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of the weekend starting at the end of the 20th century and today?
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Yeah. Well, so first of all, I would say it's hard to measure. And I think that right now,
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particularly in, in the last decade, it's getting harder and harder to really understand
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how much people are working because of the borderlessness of work, right? Because we are
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so literally like our bodies are wired to our workplaces 24 seven. So even if it, we are in
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an office, maybe now it's a virtual office, nine to five ish, you know, most people will
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probably in particularly in white collar creative class jobs report that they are taking emails
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and texting outside of that conventional work timeframe. So it's, it's hard, but here's
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what I think we know, or here was the research that stood when I wrote my book, which was that
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overall hours have remained pretty steady in North America for about, about 30 years, which
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is around 35 hours a week. But what we see is that educated and high wage earners are working
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much longer than, than 50 years ago. Self-reports suggest some, up to half of white collar workers
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are working 50 hours a week or more, not that 35 hours or more. And then on the service side,
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we have underemployed and less employed workers. So it kind of averages out to this 35 per week.
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So are we working more? Are we, or are we working less? It depends what the work is. It depends,
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you know, what kind of work you managed to get. And particularly now in this gig economy,
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many people in lower paid fields are working several jobs at once. Right. And then of course,
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there's the side hustle. So it's a slippery amorphous thing. This question, this question,
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like how much are we working? We're working a lot. And certainly anecdotally, we hear this all the
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time that when people are asked to rate the quality of their lives, one of the first things that comes
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up is concern about being busy. And I think that that has actually endured through COVID, which I
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find really interesting because there was that moment at the beginning of COVID where I think we
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all thought, Oh, we're going to get a break. Like now we're really going to back away. And our quality
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of life is going to improve so vastly. And I'm not sure that that has borne out. I guess we'll,
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we'll be finding that out. I hope so. Okay. Everyone, pretty much everyone across the spectrum
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are, they're doing some type of work on the weekend. If you're in a white collar office job,
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you might be answering emails Saturday, Sunday, taking care of, you know, things while you're
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shuttling kids to sports. But then if you're in a service sector job, a lot of that's the stuff
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like weekend is when you, you're probably working restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks,
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retail, Uber driver. And so the people in service, they might get,
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some days off, but it might not be Saturday, Sunday. It could be Tuesday, Thursday. So it's
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like, so there's like a, like, so there's an asynchrony going on with weekends with when
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our, in our culture, like everyone's not having the weekend at the same time, basically.
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Yeah, for sure. Yes. This conventional 40 hour work week that maybe our parents had this Monday
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to Friday, nine to five, it really does feel like a thing of the past. Basically you, you kind of
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never know when people are working anymore. Don't you find this? I find like if I'm contacting
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someone, I'll get out to, you know, I'm off this Wednesday, but I'm working Saturday or I'm,
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you know, not working Thursday. I work every second Friday. Like, and I've had that myself
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and my, I'm working, actually working in a podcasting company and I was working four days a week and then
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it shifted to five and then some weeks it's three. And that's also a real result of contract work,
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right? This shift from a full-time staff salaried positions to contracts.
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Yeah. And that affects us on a cultural level. Like it's, if you can't, you can't make,
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hang out with your friends if you guys aren't off at the same time, or you can't do things as a group
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if everyone's working different days of the week.
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Yeah. There's not a kind of collective experience of the week, right? Like what is,
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what is our shared time off when everyone is on a different calendar? Yeah. It really does
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change the kind of social fabric of our communities for sure.
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So we're working more on the weekends, but any other things that have encroached onto the weekend
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that makes the weekend like, you know, your son's like, man, was that it? Like what else is happening
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besides work? Well, I, I mean, you know, I, I think secularization is a big piece of this,
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right? Like we, that idea. And I think whether you're a religious person or not, it's kind of a
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beautiful concept that there's a time in the week where you can hit an off switch and remember who you
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are outside of your work identity. And of course, without a religious motivation for that, it
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becomes, you know, it's no longer an edict and it's no longer even a kind of social norm. So
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we lose something in terms of the, our kind of spiritual self. I really think that, and I don't
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mean that in a necessarily an organized religion way, but that, that kind of space in which to ponder
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and wonder and just be kind of in the world, you know, and rather than in the workplace or even
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so mentally distracted and mentally kind of compromised or like compartmentalized that you
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can no longer kind of just be in the moment. So I think that's one thing that's happened with
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the advent of a more secular world. I think technology is what we keep circling here and maybe
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haven't kind of said out loud, which is just that having our offices in our pockets is a completely
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different way to work, to live, to live into work, right? And life and work, that line between the
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two is pretty much non-existent now. And of course we lived this to its fullest during COVID when many
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people were working from home and literally had their workplaces in their bedrooms. So, you know,
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where are those boundaries between workspace and personal space? They literally don't exist for many of us
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anymore. And, but there's an expectation to, I think that comes with this moment of total
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availability, like and total commitment to work. This is a status symbol to be busy, to be overworked.
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It still has a lot of currency. And that's something that I've always been kind of interested in. Like
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why are our identities? And actually I think for men, maybe for your listeners, this is something that
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they are probably thinking about, like that success and acquisition, workplace status. Now I hear a lot
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about legacy from the older men that I know. And all of these things are bound up to work, not necessarily
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bound up in the same way to our accomplishments as human beings. You know, how loving of a parent or a
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partner or how valuable a member of the community, but you know, how much money did I make? How far did
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I advance in my, in my workplace, in my work life? And I think that this kind of fetishization of
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success, which is ongoing now for a long time is another one of the big pieces of, of why we lost
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the weekend or decided that it wasn't a priority anymore. And, and for me too, when I'm not like
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working, there's also, I feel like Saturdays are like the catch-up day. It's where you do like my
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wife and I, we call them doodads. It's like you do all this stuff, like the admin, life admin,
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pay bills, fix things, go to Home Depot five times because you always forget the one thing. Or then
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you're like taking kids to sports. And when Saturday's over, you're like, man, that, that was not fun.
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Yeah. Don't feel refreshed. No. I mean, the two most common things that people do on weekends are,
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are shopping and chores, right? Which is, I don't think either of those things are necessarily,
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I mean, sometimes shopping can be fun, I suppose for some people, but neither of those things are,
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as you say, a lot of fun. Yeah. And kids, I think in busy families and the scheduling of kids,
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kids are so, I, you know, overscheduled. This was something I really, my kids are getting older and
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I, and of course COVID, but one thing I've really noticed is how much time I have back
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because they're more independent and I don't have to hover as much and do as much schlepping of the
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children. And that is, those kinds of things really do eat up a weekend and it's what we have to be
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on guard against or the whole weekend could go like in the blink of an eye.
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Yeah. I mean, you talked about in the book with your experience, like your, I guess your kids play
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hockey and that just seems like, man, that seems like so time intensive. You know, that all the
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equipment you got to buy and like, you got to be early at the games. And that was something you
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struggled with. Like your weekends were eaten up by hockey games. I'm sure a lot of parents who
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their kids play soccer or baseball can relate to that as well.
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Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm in Canada, so it's hockey, but everyone, I think everyone with
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kids has some version of this. Yeah. It was an issue for us so much that actually we made
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a decision or in our, you know, one that our son in particular was happy to go along with
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and our daughter who also plays hockey, which was, we're sticking with house league because
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we dipped a toe into the world. You know, this is, I think actually like where we see a transposing
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of some of the things we were just talking about, about this urge for success and status.
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I think a lot of that is kind of being projected, you know, with the best of intentions mostly
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onto the lives of kids. So playing house league isn't really enough. Like we've got to get the
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kids, the private coaching and the weekends away and they're in select or they're in more competitive
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tiers with more games, more practices, driving them in and out of the city. I mean, those, those are
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like the true hockey parents will be up at 4am during the week and then, and then it's hockey
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all weekend. And, you know, I think there are kids for whom that is, it's a passion that can't
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be denied. I'm not suggesting that anyone, you know, punish their children unduly or whatever.
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But if you're a family where this has taken over, it might be really good to look at it and just say,
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is this the childhood that I want my kids to have? Because there usually does come a point in
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adolescence, many of these kids are going to burn out. They're not going to take pleasure in it
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anymore. They're going to notice that it's been kind of professionalized and that the measure of
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their engagement is, is about succeeding rather than playing and taking joy in it. And I think
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it can be kind of an infection in families, this, this high level overachievement. So what we did
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eventually, and maybe it's also just some kind of laziness, I don't know, you can judge me if you
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want, was like, we said house league only, like we just can't, we don't want to live like that.
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And it bought us back some time, which I think was worth it. I think it was worth it,
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but maybe you should ask my, my son. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our
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sponsors. And now back to the show. So let's talk about how we can take back our weekends
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because you highlight research. You know, if you want to, if you're worried about like,
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if I take two days off, this is going to like, I'm going to get behind in work. I'm going to set
00:22:51.740
myself up for failure. If you're a business owner, it's like, man, if I, if I don't, if I can't reach
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my employees during the weekend, uh, we're going to fall behind in the competition. The research
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shows that that's not going to be the case. In fact, working more hours, there's a declining
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benefit. Like at a certain point, there's just a diminishing returns on, on working long hours
00:23:12.360
without breaks, introduce errors. It can cost companies money. And on a personal level, of
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course, there's burnout and health and all of those expenses are often incurred by employers
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ultimately. Right. And countries with really long work hours report depression and high,
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high suicide rates among, among their workers. So yeah, like 40, 40 to 50 hours is pretty reasonable
00:23:37.500
above that. People will start introducing errors into their work. And it doesn't mean that they'll
00:23:42.780
be making less, more widgets. If they're working 60 hours a week, it means they're probably making
00:23:47.480
less and more of them will be of low quality, whatever those widgets are and, you know, fatigue and,
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and overwork are often causes of medical malpractice suits. The challenger space crash had an element.
00:24:00.900
There was a, you know, the cause, there's an element of, of fatigue in their oil spills. Like all,
00:24:05.760
like we, we, we see over and over that there are serious ramifications for overwork that employers
00:24:12.640
will, will bear out and not to mention the, you know, personal and the social toll of climate in which
00:24:18.620
people are expected to work to the point of utter exhaustion. So yeah, productivity is not actually
00:24:25.180
that closely tied to number of hours worked. Okay. So you make the case, one of the things you
00:24:31.120
can do to start making your weekends more refreshing, enjoyable, reviving is one thing you should make
00:24:37.220
your focus your weekend is it's all about connecting. So what are some ways that you've added more
00:24:42.040
social connection in your weekends? I mean, one thing we really know about the erosion of the
00:24:48.500
weekend is that it coincides with a kind of erosion of personal and social connections. And when we look
00:24:55.840
at what makes people happy, it's actually not the things that correlate with work, right? So it's not a
00:25:01.880
higher salary. It's not success. Yes. I think they say, what is it? $70,000 a year. That's a salary at
00:25:09.140
which people will be able to maintain a decent lifestyle. And also their anxiety will be assuaged
00:25:15.780
anxiety about money. Anything below that of course will affect happiness, but say you have that kind
00:25:19.760
of average decent salary and a decent job. That's not the thing that's going to really affect your
00:25:27.940
happiness. What it is, is your connections to other people, right? Your social life, who you've loved,
00:25:32.920
who loves you back, how much you matter in your community and to the people around you. Our happiness is
00:25:38.480
intrinsically bound. It's a sense of belonging, right? Not wealth, not status. And if we don't
00:25:44.600
have time, it's very, like, it's kind of a simple equation. If we don't have time to strengthen those
00:25:51.980
bonds, then we are less happy and less fulfilled as people. So yeah, on the weekends, I usually,
00:26:01.900
when there's not a pandemic on, would try to see somebody outside of my family for sure.
00:26:06.960
Just make sure that I'm checking in on people, remind myself, and I tend to be kind of introverted,
00:26:14.980
that being introverted is not necessarily the best way to move through the world.
00:26:20.780
And also to give something back to my community if I can. So periodically we'll try some kind of
00:26:27.860
volunteer exercise or just engage in a community meeting. Or I do, I'm involved with a writer's
00:26:34.140
group where we do workshops and underserved communities with doing creative writing
00:26:39.200
exercises. And these things are kind of small and maybe sometimes they feel, you know, or they might
00:26:44.900
seem from the outside, like meaningless gestures, but they kind of give me a profound sense of value.
00:26:53.440
And then I have, like, a kind of physical buzz. Like, there is something, you know, a definite
00:27:00.760
correlation, biological connection between altruism and feeling good. Like, you get, like, a rush,
00:27:09.220
From doing things for other people, right? Coming out of yourself a bit?
00:27:14.780
And, you know, you also talk about, you know, for people who are religious, the weekend is,
00:27:18.760
they have, like, a baked-in social connection. Because if you're a Christian, you're going to
00:27:22.680
go to church, you're Muslim, you're going to a mosque on Friday. If you're Jewish, you're going
00:27:26.500
to a temple. And they've got that there. But you also highlight people, like, non-religious people.
00:27:30.840
You gave an example. There's, like, you found this group, a bit like secular humanist, who they'd
00:27:35.660
get together at Panera Bread and they just chat about pretty much anything.
00:27:41.280
Yeah, that's right. I love that group. Well, yeah, so here's an upside of technology. It's, like,
00:27:48.360
you can kind of find anyone who shares an interest that you have, right? Like, they're the meetups
00:27:53.660
and social media and Facebook. And if you can migrate some of that online connection into real
00:28:02.360
world connection, hobbies are a really great place to meet people. And hobbies, I think, are
00:28:08.400
one of the other, another kind of collateral damage of the erosion of the weekend. We have a lot less,
00:28:15.060
people seem to have fewer hobbies than we used to. And hobbies are fantastic for that, again,
00:28:21.660
that feeling of coming out of yourself and hitting that kind of flow state, like that deep immersion
00:28:26.560
in any activity that's not monetized. It's not for profit or personal gain or status, but just
00:28:33.820
something that you love and lose yourself in. That feeling, that hitting that kind of flow state
00:28:40.640
and, you know, falling down into something. And if you're doing it in a room of other people who are
00:28:45.500
into this thing, too, even better, right? Like, I know that, like, where I live, there used to be a
00:28:50.200
whole bunch of knitting clubs and people really love this stuff. Then, you know, it kind of awakens
00:28:55.480
something in you that's sort of spiritual, that's definitely creative. I think it definitely pulls our
00:29:01.140
humanity forward and reminds us that we are people outside of work. Our identities aren't just tied to
00:29:09.100
our workplaces and our work selves, that we are fully fleshed humans.
00:29:13.900
Right. So, make connection to the top priority. If you're going to church, go to church. If you
00:29:18.000
don't do that, find a group. Or even just, like, use the time to, like, just connect with your family
00:29:22.240
or reconnect because you guys have been crazy all week going to different places. Just have a day where
00:29:26.620
we're just going to hang out. Like, we're not going to have anything planned, but we're just
00:29:30.380
going to be around each other. Yeah. Yeah. I think not having anything planned is a really
00:29:35.440
great phrase. And I'm glad you reminded me of that because I do think this compulsion to schedule
00:29:41.840
even our leisure, and I'm a little bit guilty of this myself, where I'll be like, well, I have to
00:29:47.560
work out or, you know, everything becomes an obligation. But sometimes just meandering with
00:29:55.400
your family, you know, getting in the car or getting over to a park and just being together
00:30:01.780
without an agenda is really powerful. Boredom is really powerful, right? It opens up all manner of
00:30:09.180
kind of pathways in our brains and our hearts. And, but yeah, I think, you know, we can take our
00:30:14.820
families for granted because they're around us a lot these days. And so we assume that we're
00:30:20.380
connected with them, but we're often, you know, heads bowed over our devices, everyone in their
00:30:26.460
own corners in the same building or same apartment or same house, but not really together together.
00:30:33.080
So taking that time and putting away the devices and, and, you know, having a cooking together,
00:30:39.520
doing something active together, you know, is there a sport you would all play or,
00:30:44.820
you know, some kind of physical active engagement with one another, just to remind
00:30:50.520
each other that you're more than just coworkers in a family structure, but actually people who's,
00:30:58.640
who you want to spend time with getting to know. And it sounds very basic, but I, I feel like I
00:31:04.680
definitely need a refresher on that sometimes because you can get just so caught up in the panic
00:31:09.380
of, of getting through contemporary life that you forget who's by your side.
00:31:14.120
You mentioned that just get in the car and drive. That was actually a thing. Like on Sunday,
00:31:17.680
my mom talked about doing that when she was a kid, like the Sunday drive, you just get in the car
00:31:22.660
and the fitness, where are you doing? We're just going to drive. In fact, we were, we've been
00:31:25.920
reading, uh, we just got done reading cheaper by the dozen with our kids.
00:31:30.660
Yeah. You know, classic novel written in the forties. And one of the chapters is about how they take a
00:31:35.100
Sunday drive with all 12 of the kids take a picnic. And that was it. That was like, that sounds,
00:31:40.400
and I've done that before. And it just sounds, it's just really relaxing. You don't have a
00:31:44.440
destination you're trying to get to. You just kind of drive around and look around. It's enjoyable.
00:31:47.960
Yeah. I love that. And also it doesn't cost too much, you know, because I think so often we think
00:31:56.080
we need to pay for our experiences and that idea of getting in a car and driving, or if you don't
00:32:03.360
have a car, I live in a city when our kids were younger, sometimes we would get on the subway
00:32:08.180
and go to a neighborhood we'd never been to and just walk around. And it doesn't always
00:32:14.500
mean shelling out to curate a perfect afternoon. Sometimes just spontaneous and cheap and dirty
00:32:26.660
So you mentioned hobbies are a great way to spend the weekend. As that leads me, you had a chapter
00:32:30.420
about recreation and you make this case that oftentimes when we think about recreation,
00:32:34.840
recreation, we do it wrong. There's, you said there's two types of recreation. There's passive
00:32:39.820
and active recreation. And you, you argue mostly when we choose recreation, we go with passive.
00:32:46.580
So what's the difference between passive and active and why should we choose active over passive?
00:32:51.840
Yeah. So I mean, passive recreation is you kind of know it when you're doing it. It's the kind of
00:32:57.660
what we do when we tune out and kind of, you know, binge watch a series or just check out kind of
00:33:06.440
emotionally or, and physically the, one of the phrases that someone used for this was spectatoritis
00:33:12.160
watching, you know, watching rather than doing, which is great. Like we all need that sometimes,
00:33:18.340
but if that is, if you're kind of operating at such an amped up level all the time, and then when you have
00:33:24.400
that downtime, you just unplug completely and kind of crash into that mindless consumption of,
00:33:31.280
of entertainment or sports or whatever it is. You actually don't come out feeling super rejuvenated,
00:33:37.300
right? It's kind of like a sugar high, right? It's like eating a lot of chocolate or something
00:33:41.800
like it feels good in the moment, but it doesn't actually help with a reset. So active leisure and
00:33:48.040
contrast is something like we've been talking about where you're connecting with people,
00:33:52.220
where you're participating in an activity that's kind of purposeless and not really based necessarily
00:33:59.360
on success or money, but brings you a lot of pleasure and joy. And hobbies, of course, fall,
00:34:04.580
I think fall really nicely under that idea of active, active leisure, where you can be creative and
00:34:11.060
engaged with something. And maybe within a community that kind of feeds this part of yourself
00:34:16.340
that often goes really unnurtured during the work week.
00:34:19.460
And you're saying it's okay to do passive recreation, but don't make it all that you do.
00:34:24.680
And you all say, if you're going to do it, do it with somebody else. If you're going to like
00:34:27.780
play video games, if your kids are going to play video games, make sure they're playing
00:34:33.980
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, I think that's nice because it's such a, that's social, right?
00:34:38.240
So you're bringing back in that element of connecting with another person and coming out of the self,
00:34:43.780
but yeah, like, listen, we all need to just tune out and like, you know, have the pint of ice cream
00:34:50.980
and the binge watch or whatever from time to time. But what's sort of alarming is when it becomes
00:34:57.380
the only way in which we unplug. And I think because we, so many of us have so little free time,
00:35:03.800
that's sort of feels like all we, the energy that we have, like that's the most that we can pull off
00:35:11.300
in our free time. Is that really passive watching, not doing, but it's a vicious cycle because you
00:35:18.700
actually end up feeling more burnt out at the, at the end of it. So I think we have to be as vigilant
00:35:24.140
with our leisure as we are with our work, right? Like we're really, most of us are good workers.
00:35:30.640
We want to do well at work and that's great, but I think we need to shift that emphasis a little bit
00:35:37.060
and become excellent at play as well, you know, and take as much joy and pride in our successes
00:35:44.980
at doing nothing. Right. So one thing that happened with weekends, particularly, or now it's,
00:35:53.720
we use weekends to shop, like you said earlier, but there was a time in our history in America,
00:35:59.320
and I'm sure the same was in Canada where on Sunday, they had these things called blue laws,
00:36:03.540
where if you had a store, you had to shut down. You couldn't, you couldn't, you couldn't shop on
00:36:07.660
Sunday. It wasn't an option. You make the case that you might get something out of your weekend.
00:36:12.220
If you sort of institute a personal blue law day where you don't do any shopping,
00:36:17.080
how has that made your weekends or how can that make your weekends better?
00:36:19.680
Yeah. Well, you know, we're talking about a kind of like lead stage capitalist condition,
00:36:28.020
right? This, this lust for work, this veneration of work. And of course, work is tied to consumption,
00:36:35.120
right? It's been called by economists, the work spend cycle. We work a lot so that we can spend
00:36:42.500
a lot. And then because we've spent a lot, we have to work more. So we go round and round
00:36:47.300
on the hamster wheel. So breaking that pattern, that neural pathway is, I think, really important
00:36:56.580
to, again, to just be reminded that there's a larger world out there. So if we don't engage in
00:37:07.800
the shopping and the consumption on the weekend, then we get that space back. We get the time back.
00:37:13.180
And that's so much, you know, that I think if there's anything that people might get out of this
00:37:18.540
book, I would hope that it's a kind of like fierce impulse to protect their time. And consumption,
00:37:27.640
does it make us happier? I don't think so. I certainly haven't seen any research that suggests
00:37:33.720
that buying more stuff fills the hole that many of us have inside. So maybe don't for a while,
00:37:43.000
take a break for a couple of weeks. There are lots of these experiments online when people
00:37:47.200
will talk about not shopping for two days or a week and seeing what it feels like. And I think
00:37:52.780
we're all so mildly addicted to consumption that it can be quite a shock to our systems. And all these
00:37:59.360
other ways of being in the world might open up if we break that habit. So yeah, I think it's a really
00:38:06.160
neat idea to try and recreate your own blue law day here and there if you can swing it.
00:38:11.800
Yeah, I hate shopping because it's the time factor. Even online shopping, it doesn't save
00:38:16.600
you any time because especially if you buy clothes and you're like, well, I got it. This doesn't fit.
00:38:21.360
I got to take it back. He's like, well, I got to box this up. I got to drive over to UPS or some
00:38:27.420
Amazon. It's just like, I'd rather just, I don't even, books are the one thing I buy where I enjoy a book.
00:38:34.400
Right. It does feel like books online, at least you're in like, it's words. You're already in a
00:38:40.800
word kind of world online. So it makes sense. But yes, I totally agree. And God, the online shopping,
00:38:48.220
again, this borderlessness, right? Like at least with shopping before, we used to have to leave our
00:38:54.000
houses to do it. So we would be, we'd at least be sort of outside. But now, you know, you can
00:39:01.240
literally go back and forth between working and spending in a two minute period without leaving
00:39:08.160
your chair. And I do feel like it's dangerous and become sort of habit forming and yeah, sucks up all
00:39:14.000
of that time. All right. So try not to shop or at least do less shopping on the weekends because
00:39:18.860
that'll free up some time for you. You also recommend trying to tame the amount of chores
00:39:23.860
you do on the weekend because for a lot of people, the weekend can easily turn into just doing chores
00:39:28.280
and that's it. And you can do that in different ways. One way is spreading the chores out throughout
00:39:32.540
the week. Or if you got the budget for it, maybe outsource some of your chores. So overall, the
00:39:37.780
advice is take time to connect, engage in active recreation, and then limit shopping and chores.
00:39:45.120
So how do you approach your weekends in a way so that you feel like you're getting the most out of
00:39:50.000
it, but it doesn't become another project and you feel like, I didn't do this weekend right because
00:39:55.040
I didn't allow enough time for spontaneity and relaxation. So how do you avoid that while
00:40:00.960
getting the benefits of a good weekend? Yeah. I mean, listen, I certainly don't want to turn
00:40:06.580
the weekend into another feeling of failure for people. I don't think there is one way to do the
00:40:15.540
weekend. But I think making that space, that space physically, like noticing if that calendar is
00:40:26.020
filling up, being really thoughtful in the week leading up to the weekend to say,
00:40:30.400
what is this weekend? Like, what's the balance of my weekend here? Yes, of course, we're probably all
00:40:35.880
going to have a bit of work to do, but what's the balance? Like, am I looking at like a day and a half
00:40:42.200
of work or work every hour? Can I log off for 24 hours straight and then do something on that second
00:40:50.320
day? But just above all vigilance, really, about how precious this time is, how fleeting it is.
00:40:58.600
It's funny, when I wrote this book, my son was, I think, 12 or, you know, was published, he was
00:41:04.100
probably 13. And now he's finished high school. And a lot of the concerns that, you know, I have a
00:41:09.800
daughter who's still in high school, but I, you know, was really plagued by when I was writing this
00:41:13.020
aren't really relevant to us anymore. And I have never once sat around and said, gee, I really wish
00:41:20.640
we had done select hockey. And I had done more chores that year. You know, like, all I think now
00:41:28.580
is, oh, God, that time is gone. And I can't get it back. So I would just say, those weekends, if you're
00:41:35.700
lucky enough to have a work life that gives you those two days, to guard them, to look at them
00:41:41.600
with the same as a kind of a sacred space, the way that religious people look at an actual Sabbath,
00:41:49.900
you know, to approach them with the same kind of sense of honoring that time and making the most of
00:41:55.940
it with that's kind of clear eyed and not being hard on yourself, but really taking it seriously
00:42:04.220
that this time is going to go and this is your life. And is your life going to be filled with
00:42:10.280
experiences and other people and joy and love and laughter and all those cheesy things? Or is it going
00:42:17.880
to be, I got a really big paycheck and I never turned my phone off? Maybe somewhere in the middle.
00:42:24.840
Somewhere in the middle. Well, Katrina, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to
00:42:28.420
learn more about the book and your work? Yeah, the book is available everywhere, I hope. It's called
00:42:33.660
The Weekend Effect. And my website is www.katrinaonstad.com. Fantastic. Well, Katrina Onstad,
00:42:41.020
thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much. My guest today was Katrina Onstad. She's
00:42:45.700
the author of the book, The Weekend Effect. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:42:49.520
Make sure to check out our website at katrinaonstad.com where you can learn more about her work.
00:42:53.220
Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash weekend, where you can find links to resources
00:43:05.500
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:43:09.120
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