Scientists have long known the working week contains 120 hours and the weekend contains 48. What scientists cannot explain is why the week feels like a sentence and the weekend feels like a sneeze. They have stopped investigating. They also have Mondays.
To understand it, we obtained the diary of one ordinary adult. It has been lightly edited for despair.
FRIDAY
17:31 — Logged off. Freedom. The weekend lies ahead, vast and glittering. I have plans. I will go for a walk. I will cook something with more than four ingredients. I will fix the drawer. I have said this about the drawer for three years. The drawer has outlasted two relationships.
17:45 — Lay on sofa “for five minutes” to decompress.
21:58 — Woke up on sofa. Mouth open. Phone on face. Ate cereal for dinner because it’s the weekend and rules are for people with hope.
00:40 — Stayed up late because I can. Did nothing with it. Watched a man restore a rusty knife for 32 minutes. He did more with his Friday than I’ve done with my thirties.
Staying up late on Friday is borrowing hours from Saturday at a rate your bank would call aggressive.
SATURDAY
10:12 — Woke up. Felt rested. Felt like a person in an orange juice advert.
10:13 — Remembered the list. The orange juice person has left the body.
10:30–14:00 — “Errands.” Records show I visited three shops and returned with batteries, a plant I will outlive by spite alone, and no milk. Drove past the parcel return point. Kept the parcel. The parcel lives here now. It pays no rent. Neither, emotionally, do I.
14:00 — Laundry. The machine runs for 1 hour 49 minutes. I cannot leave the house in case it needs me. It is the only thing that does.
15:50 — Hung laundry. It will not dry. It will be damp until Wednesday, like my ambitions.
16:00 — Considered the walk. Looked out the window. Decided tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow is always better. That’s how they get you to the end.
16:01–19:30 — Missing time. Possibly phone. Possibly a nap. Investigators have stopped looking. Nobody is coming for those three and a half hours.
19:30 — Dinner with friends. Laughed. Felt alive. (This is the 14 minutes. You will remember this bit. The rest is packaging.)
SUNDAY
09:00 — Woke early for no reason. My body now believes every day is a weekday. My body is a company man.
09:05 — Tried to get back to sleep. Failed. Lay there anyway, like a draft email.
11:00 — Brunch. Three hours, two of them queueing, agreeing this place is “always busy”. We paid thirty-one pounds for eggs and a wait.
14:30 — The golden hour. Nothing to do. Absolute peace.
14:31 — Started thinking about Monday.
The Sunday Scaries: A Scientific Breakdown
The Sunday Scaries are a documented phenomenon in which Monday arrives early, uninvited, and sits on the end of your bed. They start earlier every year. As a child, they began at 7pm on Sunday. As an adult, they begin on Saturday lunchtime. By retirement age, they would begin on Wednesday, if retirement still existed.
Symptoms include opening your work inbox “just to check”, rehearsing a meeting in the shower, and ironing shirts for a job that would replace you by Thursday.
Sunday afternoon is just Monday wearing a disguise. It isn’t even trying anymore.
16:00 — Looked at the drawer. Drawer looked back. We agreed on another week. The drawer will be fixed by whoever clears the flat.
18:00 — Meal prepped. One big pot of something that will be eaten Monday, tolerated Tuesday and binned, guiltily, Thursday. Like most of my plans, it started warm.
21:00 — One episode. Then another. Told myself I’d go to bed early to “start the week right”. The week has never once started right.
23:52 — Revenge scrolling. Stealing hours back from a week that hasn’t started, using a phone the week paid for.
23:53 — Calculated how much sleep I’d get if I fell asleep right now. Did this four more times. Each number worse. It was the most maths I did all weekend.
MONDAY
07:00 — Alarm. Where did it go? I had plans. I had a walk. I had a drawer.
07:01 — Counted down to Friday. Four days, ten hours, thirty minutes.
And next Friday at 17:31, I will once again be certain the weekend is vast and glittering. It isn’t. It is one nice dinner wrapped in laundry, and you get roughly two thousand more of them before someone else is folding your shirts for a charity shop.
It was a nice dinner. You’ll remember it for a week.