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THE LOST WEEKEND

Ah, the weekend. Those two days at the end of the work-week used to be cause for celebration, but that's all pure nostalgia now. Remember sleeping in on Saturdays? Enjoying warm croissants in bed? Taking Sunday drives on country roads or brisk dips in the lake? Once upon a time, the weekend signalled freedom. now it just means catching up: mad dashes to the store, endless chores and the tyranny of the laptop. And we have only our workaholic selves to blame for trying to cram all our fun into the busiest two days of the week.

Let's rethink this concept. In the mood to laze around? Nothing's stopping you. Wanna skate, bike, paddle? Well, just do it already. Maybe your boss controls the rest of your time, but the weekend is yours. Take it back.

THANK GOD IT'S MONDAY
What used to be the best two days of the week now feel more like work than play.

Text: SERGE BOUCHARD

So here I am, in the middle of the weekend, writing this essay about the weekend and actually helping to prove my own point: The lines between work and rest are gradually blurring or even disappearing altogether. Time is sweeping us along in its current. We love to talk about our weekends, but while we've been busy dwelling on them – how important they are, how much we look forward to them – the water has been rising, eroding our relaxation and freedom. Now, even those few precious days are in jeopardy.

A wise Mi'kmaq philosopher once said, while watching Europeans fish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence: "I see you risking your lives to cross the ocean, doing punishing work far from your families and your countries, and I think, 'Can your world really be any better than mine?'" Four hundred years later, his words make more sense than ever. Time spent working is time forever lost. We will never recoup the countless hours swallowed up by urgent tasks, business trips and daily errands.

Wolves don't know it's Saturday. Moose don't take weekends off. Only humans believe that Sunday should be a day of rest. The idea that the week should be divided into seven days is just that – one idea among many different concepts of time. Who said it was the right one? The week is an invention, the weekend a convention. But those two days have assumed momentous importance in our minds: Like some sort of promised land, it's enough to know the weekend is there, even if we can't quite attain it.

According to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a society that talks endlessly about happiness must be a profoundly unhappy one. By that logic, the huge significance we attach to the weekend must mean we have serious issues with the workweek. It's only since we started to work like mad that we've been going crazy for rest. Work, the very thing that can define us and give meaning to our lives, has also become a noose.

This is the deal we live with: for five days of labour we get two to recover. That unbalanced equation results from the disproportionate value we place on work. So the weekend has come to follow the first commandment of modern life: efficiency. I rest on the weekend so that I'll be more productive during the week. Weekends are just a tease, after all.

We're required to be masters of the contemporary art of switching ourselves on and off at will. On Friday afternoon, you're supposed to flick a mental switch that will shut down everything you've been obsessing about all week. Block out the workweek successfully and you're free to enjoy a weekend of leisure. On Sunday night, you're supposed to suddenly flip the switch back to work mode. The process is demeaning and quite possibly unnatural.

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