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The case for the three day weekend

The weekend, for most working folk, is a mere two days long. Trudging along to their jobs, Monday to Friday, from 9am until 5pm. If you're lucky, because these days it seems as though people are working until 5.30pm as a minimum, unless you're some kind of tradesman that finishes at 3pm, but then they have to get up at 5am and who wants that?



What happened to the eight hour work day? That was invented for a reason. Eight hours each for work, sleep, and leisure time. Now, you're lucky if you get three hours of free time after work, what with overtime, and long commutes. Then by the time you do actually collapse in the door after standing all the way home on the train, next to a middle-aged woman with no sense of personal space, whose giant handbag hits you in the stomach every time the train moves, you are too tired to do anything other than order Uber Eats and stare at Netflix until it becomes so late that you force yourself to go to bed, so that you don't almost fall asleep at your desk the next day.

I think one of the main problems is that people used to work close to where they lived. They were not forced to make an hour-long journey to their place of employment, so that they could perform mind-numbing tasks for nine hours before making the same trip home again.

While the best solution is to become successful by any means necessary, thus affording you to leave this working class nightmare behind and able to afford a shopping mall in your house a la Barbra Streisand, this is devastatingly unlikely. So I propose a three day weekend. Sure, it doesn't remove the great desire to kill yourself the other four days of the week, but it's a step in the right direction.

Every week I say that the weekend has gone too fast. You have to squeeze in all your household chores (which involve grocery shopping to buy food to eat while you're at work, and washing clothes to wear to work), plus any of those errands that seem to creep into your adult life so gradually that you suddenly wake up one day surrounded by Ikea furniture and a to-do list that has 'Go to Bunnings' written on it, wondering how you got to this time in your life. You also need to make time to see your friends so that you can all complain about your respective jobs, and if there is any time left over, a movie or some other form of recreational fun so that you can hold on to the vague notion that you're enjoying your life.

So I think three days will work well. One day for boring yet necessary household shit; washing, dishes (have those pans really been in the sink for four days?), generally making your house look like a respectable member of society lives in it, rather than a scientist who is studying the effects of the lack of human hygiene. The second day will be for socialising; coffee with friends, bowling, movies, whatever you're into. The third day, ah yes, the third day is the best of all, the day we live for, this day is for Netflix binges, reading books and magazines, takeaway, snuggling, everything lazy and comfortable and delightful.

Of course, your idea of a three day weekend may look very different to mine, you may want to run a marathon then use the next two days to recover. You may want to club-hop like you're eighteen and it's New Year's Eve. You may want to spend your time slowly torturing someone then burying their body, look I don't know, but I'm sure we can all agree that the three day weekend is the best type of weekend. Unless you're thinking that with three days off in a row then you could get another job and work three days there. Get out, you're ruining it, we don't need you for our campaign you crazy workaholic psycho.

Think about it, the disparity between our work days and our free time is just too great. We need to even it up. We're not even asking for half and half, we're still working more than we're home. We just need to even it up a little. Thank you. Me for Prime Minister.

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