As millions across the country celebrated the Fourth of July on Friday, a rare thing occurred for the American worker: a four-day work week.
Instead of meeting end-of-the-week work obligations, week-day, 9-to-5 workers across Chattanooga and the rest of the nation on Friday were able to spend time with friends and family or do whatever else they pleased.
In our work-hustle culture — where productivity in recent decades has climbed and wages have stagnated — we treat this as an infrequent luxury. But we shouldn’t. The four-day work week, for the sake of individual well-being and work-life balance, should be the norm.
This may sound infeasible to many, given how our routines are ingrained in the five-day work week. But our current work week is a relatively new phenomenon. As outlined in The Atlantic over a decade ago, working five days with two days off wasn’t the standard until the early 20th century.
Even the concept of having seven days in a week “is completely man-made,” Philip Sopher wrote for the magazine in 2014. The notion can be traced back to the ancient Babylonians, who believed there to be seven planets in our solar system. As Sopher writes, this planetary-based week spread to Egypt, Greece and eventually Rome.