Condemned to be free
We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, but really, it’s something we all decided to do. If tomorrow we all changed our mind and, say, kept three days for work and left the other two for a weekly fishing trip, people a couple of generations down would, I guess, go fishing a lot without thinking twice.
This wouldn’t be the first time anyone attempted a radical re-engineering of time either. During the French Revolution, reformers proposed a system to replace the seven-day week. The French Republican calendar still divided the year into twelve months, but each month was made up of three, ten-day “weeks,” or décades. Days were then divided into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one hundred seconds.
Nobody uses that system today, which tells you everything you need to know about how well it went. For one, workers were accustomed to a day of rest every seven days, and they found the new rhythm of nine straight days of labor much more exhausting. But the issue was more than just the physical toll of the extra workload. The traditional Sunday served as the cornerstone of community life: a day for church, for the market, and for the social gatherings that had kept villages together for centuries. The new, state-mandated rest day, the décadi, offered none of that shared ritual. As a result, many peasants defied the law and continued to observe their old Sunday, sometimes at great personal risk.
A bit of a failed experiment, the Republican calendar still lasted over a decade. Its biggest lesson: timekeeping must adapt to people, not the other way around.
No such thing as a natural rhythm
If artificial “clocks” don’t work, should we simply return to a more “natural” rhythm? The idea sounds appealing, but we run into an immediate problem: What, exactly, is a natural rhythm? Is it the cycle of sunrise and sunset? Is it our own internal biological clock? The moment you try to define it, you discover there’s no universal standard.
Without a universal “natural” rhythm that we can all follow, one popular modern answer is to engineer your own. The entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss championed this idea in The 4-Hour Workweek, proposing that we apply the logic of a startup to our personal lives. His approach is to apply business principles, like the 80/20 rule, to optimize for personal freedom. Life’s ambitions become well-defined projects, turning spontaneous adventure into meticulously planned “lifestyle design.”
This feeling of profound responsibility—the pressure of being the sole architect of a meaningful life—is not a new phenomenon. It’s a modern expression of what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called being “condemned to be free.” Sartre argued that, without a preordained purpose, humans are terrifyingly free, and entirely responsible for creating their own meaning and values. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,” he writes, suggesting that this is the very source of our deepest anxiety.
Sartre’s philosophical dread is visible today in the psychology of leisure. Studies on retirement, for example, consistently show that an abundance of unstructured time often leads to a decline in well-being, rather than an increase in happiness. As psychologist Barry Schwartz explains in The Paradox of Choice, infinite options can lead to paralysis and dissatisfaction, not liberation.
The question, then, is not how to escape structure, but what kind of structure actually leads to a fulfilling life. The five-day workweek, designed for the industrial age, was one answer. The four-hour workweek, designed for the age of the individual entrepreneur, is another. As remote and asynchronous work becomes the norm, we are being given a historic opportunity to experiment with new answers—to invent a life that includes both productivity and purpose.