20210826 : Days of the week

I In recent days, I have heard a lot of TGIFs, many thank god its Sunday, and some even TGIMs. I know we hate Sundays in our house as our nanny/ housekeeper doesn't come and we have to do everything ourselves.

Which got me thinking, why do we have the weekly holidays on Sat and Sun and not other days. Is it because of the bad influence of Saturn maybe?

Then I got to thinking what is a week anyway? Doesn't coincide with any astronomical cyclic event. Like a day, a month (true month, 28 days, corresponding to the moon's cycle. Not the arbitrary calendar we follow - that's a different story), or the year (365 days to go around).

Nothing for the week.

Turns out we owe it to the Babylonians (modern day Iraq).

They were very good observers of the cosmos in general (stars and planets). They obsessed with 7 of them (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus ans Saturn). So, when they wanted to segment the month further for better tracking, the choice was straight forward. 7 days.

There was no concept of holiday still. Much later, when thera was a lot of demand for rest. The start of week, not end of week, was Given a day of rest. (The world has not yet agreed on what is the start of week. You can set it in your calendar applications too).

Much much later, due to many movements by workers, who believed a 2 day break would be more beneficial and productive succeeded. Even then there was no uniformity. For ex, UK followed Sun & Mon as holidays for a long time. It was somewhere around 1860 that it became a bit more uniform.

There is still no mandate. People are free to follow anything as long as they follow the mandated number of hours a week . Everyone follow the same for uniformity and convenience.

Coming back to the week, the choice of naming the days was random. Nothing to do with any believed influence of those celestial bodies. Could have been any order. This just stayed.

This concept of week propagated via annexation, trade influence and spread all over and was generally accepted. Hence the day names of the week may be in different languages but mean the same everywhere.

It was only formally declared as the week in 321AD by emperor Constantine.

Any God I have heard of definitely predates that. So, next time anything comes up associating some day of the week as auspicious or not fine for some God, you know Its utter nonsense. In their time, they wouldn't even have heard of it.

Some days may be considered by folks as good/bad based on the coincidence with the day/ phase of moon. But by itself, as a day of the week, no significance.

Which provokes the curiosity. What if it were not like this.

Would it be better to not have fixed weekends. What if everyone just got that many leaves every month. Would it be better to take a break when we really needed it, rather than be forced every week.

What if there were no holidays every week. (Apart from usual leaves and holidays). We would just have 6 hr days. 4 shifts instead of 3 of 8 hrs. Would it be more productive to have more time for family, friends and other hobbies?

What if....