Friday

If you study anthropology even just a tiny bit (as I have...very tiny bit) you realize how much of the way we see the world is dictated by our culture and our language. In Anthropology 101 (which I mostly slept through...snoring loudly) you learn one of the first and most basic things anthropologists do is map out the way that cultures describe and name kin relationships. For example if every male who is 10 years older than you in a village is called "uncle" whether they are related by blood directly or not then that both defuses the importance of what we call "uncles" (brothers of you mother or father) and intensifies the familial connection to the rest of the village. Your experience of that person is altered by your culture and your language.

The same thing is true of almost anything. I started this blog post about a month ago and for the life of me I can't remember why I named it "friday" but I've decided that it's because of the effect of language on time. See an important experience that is structured by our language and culture is our experience of time. Apparently Native American cultures have a different way of interacting with time than Europeans. Circular time versus linear time. This is probably bullshit but for the sake of argument and fun lets just assume that it's true. If you conceive of time as a circle rather than a line you would view life in a fundamentally way (it would seem).

But since everyone in our culture works like we are moving forward along a timeline let's not mess with that. Too many new age philosophers have expounded the idea that a circular view is more spiritual and natural and healthy for me to find the question interesting.

The really interesting thing is to suggest that we change the length of the week to something more digital. Let's do a 10 day week! Lets work for 6 days and take 4 days off!

How would that change things?

Well first of all we be working 60% of the time rather than 71% so that would be good. Second of all we'd have much longer weekends.

How about we work 70% of the time but split it up with a day in the middle. So its

workday
workday
workday
off day
workday
workday
workday
workday
offday
offday

Discuss.

Oh and why are the days of the week named for Norse gods? How random is that?