Weekends and holidays are probably good

I feel like a bit of a derp for having failed to notice

(I’ve been bad about crediting the images I use for each blog post because Substack makes that moderately inconvenient, but today’s is from the British Museum.)

I recently read an article on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry that talked about the lives of peasant agriculturalists:

That annual calendar, of course, structured agricultural work, determining the kind of labor that our peasants (mostly the men, in this case) but it was also a calendar of anxiety for our peasants. After all, roughly three-quarters of the households annual calories came in during a single month – July in in a winter-wheat region, August if you’ve planted spring wheat. Remember our quote of Theophrastus, “the year bears the harvest, not the field.” Meaning harvests were significantly variable one year to the next and as we’ve seen our peasants do not have large margins of error in terms of their production.

[…]

So our peasants have Janus-like worries, looking forward and looking back. Looking forward, once the seed is in the ground, while our peasants can weed and watch as carefully as they can most of the process is out of their control. Too much rain or too little, weather too hot or too cold, can ruin the harvest (while ideal conditions might produce a ‘bumper crop’ and a good year), but the farmer can only sit and watch and work on other tasks and desperately hope.

[…]

So the calendar is a cycle of anxiety, relief and despair: anxiety as the family waits for the harvest, watching the skies for weather and the pantry for its steady depletion. Glorious relief if the harvest is good, the pantry restocked, another year survived and despair if it is poor, which at best likely means seeking aid – with many strings attached – from the Big Man with his Big Estate and at worst means the household loses some of its most vulnerable members, the “vacant seat…and a crutch without an owner.”

But the yearly calendar is not just the harbinger of threat and anxiety: it is also the bringer of joy and society, because the year is studded with festivals, days of rest and social gathering, joy and merry-making. Of course we still have holidays too, but I wonder if we don’t miss their potency to pre-modern farmers because – with, at least for some of us, eight-hour-work-days, two-day weekends and built-in vacation days – they are not our only escape from labor.

My first thought on reading it was, “It seems odd that they took rest days and holidays, when they eat what they grow and can always do more work and in the doing somewhat improve their odds of surviving the year.” How could you justify taking a break? Sure, sure, in theory, working all the time isn’t the best way for a human to maximize their productivity, but, psychologically, how could a farmer who’s worried about their children going hungry possibly bring themself to take a break before hitting their physical or mental limits and burning out?

But then I realized, of course, that this is the entire purpose of a scheduled rest day, or a scheduled holiday – it imposes a default action, which you’d need a special reason to overrule.

And then I felt like a bit of an idiot.

Because, okay, so, I have a confession to make.

I like concrete cubes. I think they’re pretty.

There was an Astral Codex Ten post about architecture with the thesis that something has gone horribly wrong, but all of the buildings Scott hated, I liked, and all the buildings Scott liked, I didn’t.

I think the great male renunciation was when male fashion became pleasant to look at.

I’m pretty content eating boiled oats or boiled noodles, with nothing on them.

When I want something fancy or feel worried about, like, scurvy, I’ll buy a lemon, peel it, and eat it like an orange. Or a tomato to eat like an apple.

I stayed at a hotel in England once, and learned that for breakfast I could eat steamed tomatoes, unsalted. Or I could eat bread. Or I could eat beans. English cuisine is, in my opinion and to the extent of my knowledge, the best in the entire world. I vaguely regret that I didn’t eat more of it while I lived there, but the Sainsbury’s nearest my apartment sold Asian noodles cheaper.

I am spiritually British; I lack a certain human sentiment.

This is to say, I haven’t celebrated a birthday since growing up and leaving home, don’t celebrate most holidays, and I don’t take weekends, because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything that makes those days different from any other ones.

This isn’t the best way to maximize a human’s productivity, but picking any specific day to rest or celebrate doesn’t feel like a default to me, and I seldom feel that I have any great reason to break from routine unless I desperately have to.

Anyway, this is silly. I think medieval peasants were probably doing better than me in this domain, which is frankly ridiculous.