Day 54 of writing every day.
TGIF is the acronym for “Thank God it’s Friday,” that gets thrown out on Fridays by people who work weekdays and have the weekends off. This time-model of having five days for the weekdays and two days for the weekend is also essentially the standard for public schools in the US. That means this view of how time should work as a society is indoctrinated into the vast majority of Americans of all ages.
I don’t know how the idea of a five day workweek and two-day weekend became the norm for so many across specific parts of the world, but in Japan the equivalent of TGIF would be 華金 (read hana-kin).
I’ve written my thoughts about the constructed view of time and its role in modern human society before and it’s not something I’ve gotten over because of how unfair things seem to be for the majority of people bound by it versus those who aren’t bound by it.
The weekdays and weekends are just a social construct that humans created and are imaginary things we collectively agreed to give consequential powers to. Just like money, which used to be shells, then different types of metal, and now printed paper/plastic, and even just 0s and 1s that can be formulated into crypto currencies or digital money.
Having a common time system in place is great for scheduling and planning things in advance. However the system has been abused to control the vast majority of people’s lives. For however many hours a week, we all must work on these days for a wage of x amount of money/hour.
There’s no escaping this system unless you’re too young to work, or are unemployed because you can’t work, won’t work, are retired, or simply are so rich you don’t need to work. I’m sure there are many exceptions in how to make a living that people can do that don’t bind them to a clock or calendar every day, but I’m not here to talk about the clickbait kind of topic on how people stopped working by following some tricks.
Too many people worship material wealth and those who actually have it spare no effort to claim as much of it and hide as much of it away as possible out of reach of the working masses. I’m no communist, but the way the world is run today with a unchecked thirst for material wealth through exploitation is not sustainable for humans and the Earth as we know it if you ask me.
That’s why I despise the proverb “time is money” when taken literally. Time is much more valuable than money but so many of us are forced to trade it doing things we don’t even like or want to do to make money for others who might be doing less work and have more time for themselves and keeping the lion’s share of the value wrought by labor.
The media has the audacity to discuss money in the sense that one hour of the time of the richest people can be worth more than what most people might hope to make in a year or perhaps even decades if not their entire life. Of course it’s not like that many of the wealthiest are all self made. Their worth is imaginary—mostly stocks and collectible goods that have been assigned high monetary value—until they’ve liquidated the assets they hold into actual money. Most, until they prove they do, don’t actually work anywhere near as hard as the people that work under them but they get credited with all the success.
Well that’s enough ranting. Maybe some day gains in worker productivity will be reflected in their pay and shorter work weeks. Perhaps someday it won’t be Friday but Thursday or Wednesday we’re thankful for. Or maybe time won’t matter anymore in the sense of working when we want for how long we want instead of in the sense we’re working and all the time no matter what day it is.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 