What Day Does The Week Start On?
If your week has started at all, that is...
A quick note before we dive into today’s topic…
Shiprecs #5 (Why Are Chocolate Bars Getting Smaller?) dropped on March 15th, musing about the perils of shrinkflation and the value seeping out of consumer goods. Twelve days after this, a story on shrinkflation (centred around chocolate bars) appears in the Irish Times. A mere couple of weeks later, the ink is barely dry on Shiprecs #6 (Has AI Taken Your Job Yet?) before the NYT publishes a thinkpiece on whether workers’ jobs will be subsumed by AI’s growth.
Now, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I can tell you that neither the managing editor of The Irish Times nor The New York Times has had the bravery to subscribe to Shiprecs using their work email. Presumably they’re using a burner, or have one of their drones passing on the essential writing of this publication to support their own dying enterprises. Either way, there is no beef - I am happy to merely give the people what they want. And seemingly, what the people want is a biweekly inane question into their inbox such as…
What day does your week start?
I’ve always enjoyed thinking about how we perceive time and its passing.
Apart from this being a sort of fundamental element of human awareness, it’s something that differs enormously depending on culture, geographic location, and even the language we use. Ancient Greeks differentiated between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos - which actually means “the right, critical, or opportune moment”). I like to think that thousands of years ago, someone in Athens thought: “god, that discus throwing session was only an hour? It felt like three, my back is killing me” - and then invented a word for it.
The thing is, our brains don’t have sensory instruments that measure time, relying on our senses and circadian rhythms to keep us afloat. Disruptors come in the form of our memories (which help add context), attention spans (“losing track of time”/”flow state”), or our body clock being disrupted (looking at you, jet lag). Ecologists have studied animals to see how they perceive time and found a general link between metabolic rate - flies (fast metabolic rate) experience time more slowly than elephants (slow metabolic rate), helping their speed and instincts as they watch the rest of us live life in slow motion. How’s that for kairos?
If we’re pretty bad at maintaining an innate sense of time, we’re quite good at inventing arbitrary rules to govern time - then fighting about it. The most topical example, after clocks changed in Ireland this weekend, is Daylight Savings Time (DST): The Atlantic has called it bad for teenagers and “the greatest continuing fraud ever perpetrated on the American people”. On this side of the Atlantic, the European Parliament decided to end it in 2019 after millions of EU citizens voted to ditch seasonal clock changes, but implementing the end of DST in 2021 was delayed by COVID and the issue is still floating, untethered and undecided, in the EU’s political ether (it’s up to EU member states to come up with a solution). The UK, of course, would not be subject to any EU-wide decisions on DST (they still use British Summer Time1 ) which means that while we might not have a hard border on the island, we might have two different timezones.2
Regardless - Daylight Savings and timezones are unfortunately out of our hands. It’ll be up to Big Government to make the call on that one. What we can decide, unequivocally, is which day we think the week starts. This, unlike the passing of time, is something our brains surely feel instinctively.
I was sure that the world agreed the week started on Monday until I met a few adamant folks saying Saturday was the last day of the week.
I thought this was a bit of a contrarian take until I discovered the graph at the top of this piece - revealing that there is a global split between Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (though a big shout out to The Maldives, the only country in the world starting their week on a Friday, for some reason). While just 67 countries start their week on a Sunday compared to the 160 countries in the Monday club, those 67 countries contain over 4 billion people compared to 3.3 billion backing Monday.
Why is this? Well, it has to do with the invention of the weekend. Sunday was the first day of the week for most of history until a two-day weekend prompted us to use the five-day work week as a measure of time. With the day(s) of rest no longer being defined by religion, the global shift from Sunday to Monday was formalised in 1988 by the Geneva-based International Organisation for Standardisation, which decreed with ISO 8601 that the week starts on Monday. Most Europeans, being the organised rule-followers that we are, promptly changed our calendars to align with the new standards, and it’s been the same ever since.
Whatever day your week starts, I’m sure you still have the odd Wednesday that feels like a Monday or *shudders* a Monday that feels like a Friday.
I wonder did the Ancient Greeks have a word for that one, too?
If you enjoyed today’s read - please share with a friend or two. It’s the best way for this newsletter to grow :)
Recommended Reading - 2023 Edition #7
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
The defining piece of journalism about Frank Sinatra, and one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published.
by Gay Talese in Esquire
Read it because: here it is, my favourite profile of all time. This portrait of Frank Sinatra, struggling with the common cold at the height of his fame and power, has been imitated by writers for years and never bettered. Talese’s magnificent descriptive ability blurs the line between man and myth as he follows him from the booth to film sets, raging parties, and further afield. It was an instant sensation when it was published in 1965, and remains an utter delight to read. Sinatra fans - stick the kettle on, settle in, and enjoy this one.
Doordash And Pizza Arbitrage
There is such a thing as a free lunch
by Ranjan Roy in Margins
Read it because: what happens when a trader and his friend (who runs a pizza business) notice that they can buy their own pizzas, and make money?
This is a chunk of solid internet gold: no other piece sums up heady days of the 2010s startup gold rush or the madness of the food delivery business quite like this.
When Did Our Personal Lives Get So Professional?
The ubiquity of corporate organizational tools means how we manage our work and private time often doesn’t look that different. Is that bad?
by Madeleine Aggeler in The New York Times
Read it because: sometimes you get an oddly professional vibe from an intensely personal interaction - you email an old friend and get a starchy OOO bounceback from a personal email, or maybe you have a formalised Zoom link to chat to your sister in Australia (why is this okay but MS Teams feels… wrong?). This piece explores that blurry line and the feeling it engenders without necessarily looking for a neat solution. In a world where some strive for better personal organisation and some look to draw a neater line between work and life, it made me think.
Consider The Hedgehog
Within ten days they have learned how to roll into a ball; within 14, their eyes open, and they take on that distinctive look of polite, gracious inquisitiveness.
by Katherine Rundell in The London Review of Books
Read it because: Katherine Rundell’s ‘Consider the…’ articles take a droll look at the animal kingdom and how we have interacted with it throughout history, one animal at a time. While her pieces on the hummingbird, the giraffe, and the wombat (among others) are also beautifully written, I love this piece on the hedgehog - a small and magnificent member of Ireland’s ecosystem that deserves more attention.
That’s all for this week folks - let me know if you enjoyed the recs (you can tap the ‘like’ button, reply to this mail or comment below) and if you know someone who would enjoy - just forward this mail. See you in a fortnight!
Bizarrely, the proposal of British Summer Time (BST) was initiated in the UK in 1907 by William Willett, the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Does that qualify him for nepo baby status?
From 1880 til the end of 1916 Ireland had a thing called Dublin Mean Time which meant we were 28 minutes and 21 seconds different from Great Britain. This affected a ton of things in its brief tenure, from international communications to the British Army’s ability to deal with the 1916 Rising.