Phthursday Musings: 2,500 Weeks

Exactly 17,500 days ago today - that’s 2,500 weeks - I was born.

I told my wife about this impending topic and I think she rolled her eyes so hard that her neck cracked. So I’d say you’re all in luck!

I am wired like this: once in receipt of some kind of fancy number, I look for the profundity in it. This is kind of what a lot of baseball is about, if you think about it: a bunch of fancy numbers with forced profundity.

Here goes with the forced profundity!

This is the paragraph where I wish to try and explain how the day and the year are immutable scientific concepts, whereas the week and the month are something different. I decided not to get too fancy in explaining that distinction and am instead just stipulating to it.

The flora and the fauna are subject to various natural rhythms, which from the dimension of time can be understood primarily in terms of days and years, or to put it another way, in terms of light/dark and seasons. Humans however have uniquely created certain other constructs around which rhythms can form.

My argument is that the rhythm of the week should be understood as a sociocultural construct and not as something inherent or immutable. There’s nothing about the human condition which outright dictates that we couldn’t function properly if we followed an eight day week involving five days of work and three days of rest. I’m not trying to claim that the social order is irrelevant - but rather that it is a social order.

In turn, the idea of the 40 hour week should also be understood as a social construct - one that was intended to box in a social order which was out of control in how oppressive it was for labor. The thing is that the 40 hour week has itself substantially evolved to a place where it is overly oppressive for labor, both in the sense that it’s rarely truly 40 hours, and in the sense that excessive capitalist thinking seeks to squeeze extreme productivity out of every minute. For many workers, the total stress of the average working hour today is much greater than the total stress of the average working hour from a century ago. This may at first sound absurd - whose stress today can match that of the non-unionized coal miner? - but isn’t stress palpable in many settings today which you would never have associated with stress before?

It’s not just work, of course. We seem to be constantly packing more and more into the week. I think the week is the unit which we are most overtaxing, because individual hours and even days vary so much, but the week still seems small enough to control, and there are so many completion rituals associated with the week. It’s as though, as humans, as part of the collective capitalist obsession, we’ve decided to challenge the seeming inefficiencies of the week. And I think as a result many of us are not doing as well as we could be. I think the week is a construct around which we can better understand our deep mental health epidemic.

Phthursday Musings is itself indicative of what I’m getting at. META-SPIEL was already around but I found I needed some sort of structure / artifice / discipline / excuse. As much as anything this is because I’ve long been a certain kind of procrastinator… not quite someone who puts things off to the last minute, but rather someone who needs the deadline as a way of organizing a mental approach. If I have to create a PowerPoint presentation for work, I might literally not create a slide until 90 minutes before I have to present it, but I’ll have spent substantial time thinking about the slide order in advance. This means that when I sit down and start building, I already have most of a plan, and I can seemingly do everything very quickly. But really it’s hours of thinking that goes into minimal “work”. Writing META-SPIEL pieces can often be like this as well, and I assume this is what it’s like for many people who identify as writers. And deciding to impose an artificial deadline of 11:59pm Thursday has allowed me to be more productive, and of course creative, but it’s the productivity aspect I want to focus on here.

I’m a compiler, a tabulator, a measurer. How do I evaluate the totality of the “work product” of META-SPIEL? Well, I can evaluate it largely in terms of quantity, because I have no available standards for evaluating quality. To be honest with all of you, I’d hoped that by now I’d have built up hundreds of subscribers - maybe not everyone would read everything, but a lot of people would read a fair amount of things. But that’s not how it’s worked, and so I still think mostly in terms of production.

So what I’ve done, in effect, is created weekly work (admittedly not every week but still most weeks for a while) when there was no such internal or external expectation before. My point isn’t that this is good or bad in and of itself, but rather that it’s such a good example of the creation of a duty which has a weekly cadence.

Humans are creatures of rhythm, some more so than others. I think for many of us, the inability to settle into nice rhythms explains a lot of how and where we’re off. Lately I’ve fallen back into a typical rut where, in order to fall asleep, I have to thoroughly exhaust myself, which in turn makes mornings more difficult. This, I think, explains a lot about why the pandemic - more specifically the lockdown - is fondly recalled by many people. While a lot of people had their rhythms badly disrupted, some of us were able to settle into healthier rhythms - especially daily and weekly rhythms. When we in turn emerged and tried to quench our social thirst… how many of us never quite settled into a new rhythm that works well?

I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon the 2,500 weeks milestone… I think maybe I was curious about the total number of days I’d been alive. When I came up with it, I thought, I’ve got to write about this! But my first thought was that I’d come up with something about the number 2,500 and how to think about that.

Each week I’ve been alive has been 0.04% of my life. If I took that fraction and applied it to the day, it’d be 34.56 seconds, which is a long enough portion of the day to be noticed, but maybe not long enough to necessarily be remembered? (I think the previous clause after “34.56 seconds” took approximately 34.56 seconds to write.)

I think that visualizing one out of 2,500 might be a more interesting approach though. On a grid that’s 50×50, it’s one square:

It’s such a small piece, but still large enough to be visible… relevant to the whole.

The secret to a rich life, I think, is for most weeks to be colorful, where colorful means a week well spent. The secret is not to try and make every week so packed full of action that the whole grid turns black. That sort of approach makes for… a smaller grid.

How did we get to where well spent requires getting as much done as possible and how do we get away from that?

So I didn’t know where I was going to go with the above and I feel like maybe I made it too doom and gloom but the mind goes where the mind goes.

What I wanted to do here was something ridiculous around “famous weeks” but I only came up with two things… former Brewer Rickie Weeks:

and of course:

I would have liked to have spent the time offering a thorough dissection of Astral Weeks, which is one of those rare albums where when you listen to it, even if you’re not sure how you feel about it, you must recognize that something extraordinary is going on.

I don’t often get the chance to sit back and listen to an album. Even if I’m alone, I manage to have multiple other things going on. And this isn’t an album you listen to while on the treadmill. You need to give it your undivided attention.

Van Morrison has worked pretty hard in recent years to build up his reputation as an ornery jackass. What I have to say is this: I don’t think this album could have been made by someone who wasn’t in significant part an ornery jackass. This is not some kind of backhanded criticism, nor is it some kind of awkward lament. It’s an observation of reality, and reality is messy, and if we can’t acknowledge that it’s often messy things which becomes the most important things, we’re missing a lot of the point. My old pal Barnaby might call this a new dialectic! (He would not call this a new dialectic.)

Anyway, here’s Van the Man when he did Astral Weeks live:

Look at me, publishing a Musings some time before 9pm on a Thursday! Maybe the next 2,500 weeks will be different…