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In 1929, the Soviet Union decided to get rid of the shared weekend.
Stalin’s government wanted factories to run continuously, so it split the working population into five groups, assigned each a different rotating day off, and staggered everyone’s schedules so production never stopped. The new system was called the nepreryvka, the continuous workweek.
The seven-day week was cut loose from the rhythm of work, and the human costs were immediate. You might be off on a Tuesday while your spouse was working or be forced to work while your children were home from school. Communities increasingly felt disconnected from their loved ones.
A letter in the newspaper Pravda in the weeks after the new calendar took effect captured it: “What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.”
The experiment was modified within two years and later abandoned outright. People weren’t refreshed by their days off. They were isolated by them.
I’ve been thinking about the nepreryvka a lot lately because I fear we are running a subtler version of it, and we haven’t yet admitted it isn’t working.
A more recent natural experiment makes the same point from a different angle. The psychologist Terry Hartig studied what happens during Sweden’s vacation season, when a large share of the country is off work at the same time. He and his colleagues tracked the dispensation of antidepressants month by month. Prescriptions fell as more people took vacations at once. The effect held even among retired Swedes who had no jobs to take a break from.
What these people were benefiting from, Hartig concluded, wasn’t free time. It was the fact that other people also had the same free time. He called the effect “the social regulation of time.”
Your free time is most restorative, it turns out, when it is someone else’s free…
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