You’re All Wrong About the Worst Day of the Week

Only sad sacks and lunaediesophobes think Monday is the worst day of the week. The real life-ruiner is Tuesday. Existentially, it’s diseased. The parched wasteland of the planetary hours, it stretches on and on, and in its stinking heat the precious seedlings of Monday’s hopes wither and perish. (Wednesday offers meager redemption, unless you count the freedom to say “hump” with impunity. Which—what of it?—I do.) Yet it’s Friday that Americans spend their vacation days on. Friday that half-caring employers declare half days. Friday that Microsoft’s Japanese division experimentally eliminated from the workweek for one month in summer 2019, resulting in a 39.9 percent spike in labor productivity, the panegyric gyrations of tech journalists everywhere, and—I suspect—a cascade of Silicon Valley copycats clamoring to follow suit. This is lunacy on a level with lunaediesophobia. Look around your joyless open-plan office space on a Friday afternoon. Many people are, in fact, smiling. That’s because freedom beckons. It’s a proprietary species of corporate chicanery that says Friday needs saving. It doesn’t. Tuesday does. Imagine it: a weekend followed by a Monday followed by a little more weekend, noncontiguously. Where’s Elon Musk when I need him? That guy should be treating with sabbatical sacrality the weekday associated with the god of Mars, his favorite planet. He could—the most Muskian disruption imaginable—call for its official designation as the New Day of Rest. For the love of Tíw, Elon, free Tuesday. Terraform it from red hellscape into livable oasis, and the surge in happiness and innovation might just get us to Mars.

This article appears in the January issue. Subscribe now.