What if the weekend disappears?

The weekend is a relatively late invention. Week not: The fact that it exists and lasts seven days is the result of a Babylonian error. Those Iraqis believed there were only seven planets, and that each determined one day that week, they decided to create it.

For thousands of years, who had to work and do it for six days and then rested on God's day. But at the beginning of eight hundred, the lords of the English factories, tired of their missing Mondays because they got drunk and drunk on Sundays, offered to quit on Saturday afternoon, drink, rest on Sunday, and return to the factory early Monday morning: they created “on English Saturday”.

Despite this, working hours remained eternal: workers in wealthy countries continued to struggle to ensure a little more lives. In 1926, Henry Ford introduced the five - day factory of his work - not only enjoyed and stimulated workers but also allowed time to consume because the workers were becoming consumers. Shortly thereafter, the 1929 crisis brought a wave of unemployment, and fewer hours of work per head would bring a little more work for everyone. The forty-hour work week became the norm.

How about we all work 15 hours a week?

Those who like me are more than 30 years old and less than 100, the two-day weekend seems the most natural thing in the world. There were times when it was invulnerable. Above all in Europe, the weekend was rigid: 20 years ago, in Paris, Munich and Stockholm, it was very difficult to find open, a library or a shoemaker. It only worked public services: transportation, recreation sites, health services, police. Now it's not like this anymore: it's imposed on the American model, in which the weekend is a moment to buy, and that requires millions of people to be at work selling.

But even so, the distinction was soon preserved: Those workers agreed to work on special days, which were exceptions, and were usually paid on their own. The big difference is that the boundaries between work and leisure have become increasingly indistinguishable. There are more and more people working everywhere. Some of us do it because we like what we do, others because they're very worried about what they do, many others because of a conscious combination of both.

It helps to work from home (and thus has a lack of time and work limit) and that electronic devices make it possible for those with time and office to follow them wherever they go. In an era when work is not viewed as weight but as a privilege, it is expected that those who have one care for it by becoming available 24 hours in 24, seven days in seven, or almost.

Enthusiasm to have time available for itself, armoured in front of any market mechanism, is no longer fashionable. But not all evil comes to do harm. There is something doctors call the weekend effect “”: weekend patients die ten percent more than those laid down during holiday days. Not known how or why, but it happens.

So maybe the progressive disappearance of the weekend will have one of those side effects that no one can estimate, and these people will no longer die. Maybe without the weekend we'd all be immortal. Or besides, it's going to be exactly the opposite. / Source: El Pais World.al