A few years ago, my wife, Angie, and I made a pact: Every Sunday, we swore to each other, we will abstain from work. And we kept our promise: On the second day of each weekend, we start our morning and end our night by bingeing TV in bed. In the middle of the day, we binge TV on the couch, taking breaks exclusively to nap or read.
The door of our apartment is opened only for pizza to be slid inside. Chores go undone. Fitness is spurned. Job-related emails—or, God forbid, texts—are not read. When we feel the familiar anxiety creeping in and imagine our inboxes filling up or our muscles turning to jelly, we’re tempted to act—but we fight to stay still.
Lazy Sunday, as Angie and I like to call it, is hardly a revolutionary idea. A weekly time of rest is, after all, an ancient staple of several religions. And the five-day workweek has been the standard in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Spillover into non-workdays, though, is common; a 2015 RAND survey, for instance, found that about half of American employees do work in their free time in order to meet job demands. For many who started working from home during the pandemic, the boundary between labor and leisure has dissolved even further. More and more, individuals can’t rely on societal norms or even their own employers to draw that line for them; they have to do it themselves.
Please select this link to read the complete article from The Atlantic.