Sunday had a certain tempo, which had been in existence for centuries. It was less noisy and was nearly religious in its silence. Markets were late opening, the family hung over breakfast, and time itself appeared to slacken. Sunday in most cultures served as a transition between what needed to be done the previous week and the tasks that needed to be accomplished the following week. It was not a day off; it was a mental reset.
Nowadays, that rhythm is losing its significance.
The contemporary Sunday is much like a dim imitation of Monday. E-mails are reviewed to keep up with the times. Advertisements in the form of podcasts are playing during what would have been a lazy, dreary morning. The social media feeds are flooded with Sunday reset routines, productivity planners, and motivational posts suggesting that people have to prepare, optimise, and improve. A day of rest has been easily turned into a day of preparation.
This shift is not accidental. This shift is a cultural product of hustle culture, which promotes the philosophy that one must always be productive, not only because it is right but also because it is necessary. Within hustle culture, rest is not rest anymore; it has to prove itself.
The idea of hustle culture is directly related to the larger criticism of neoliberal values about work as expressed by such authors as Byung-Chul Han in his book The Burnout Society. In his argument, Han asserts that people in modern society have shifted from achieving a society where they are motivated to be endless in their productivity due to the absence of external control (disciplinary society) to an achievement society, where people strive to achieve success in their endeavours (Han, 2013). It is a kind of self-exploitation presented as ambition.
Sunday is the casualty of this order.
People absorb the work pressure rather than bosses imposing working hours. A contemporary employee tends to bring work along wherever they go, not only when they are not present at the job. The mind is open to work, whereas the laptop is closed. There is an inkling of guilt in the rest.
One of the issues is the fact that technology can eliminate the temporal barriers. Phones, meeting tools, and telecommuting applications enable work to creep into areas that were not earlier exposed to it. A message that comes on a Sunday afternoon does not seem dangerous until it becomes habitual.
Slowly, Sunday begins to feel like a break and becomes a pre-meeting.
This change is enhanced by social media. The areas that were used as places of leisure have turned out to be performance spaces. The aesthetic of Sunday productivity has emerged: well-planned schedules, food videos, workout systems, and productivity checklists. It is a rather delicate and incessant message; successful individuals never really rest.
They optimise their rest.
This is especially apparent to younger professionals and students who have to cope with competitive economies. Sundays are becoming the catch-up days in South Asian urban culture, where professional stability tends to have familial demands. Coursework, freelancing, studying and exams, and side jobs creep in and fill the gap that used to be occupied by rest.
The irony is that such a hyper-productive strategy tends to bring down the efficiency it is purported to bring about. Studies in occupational psychology have always indicated that recovery periods are necessary for cognitive functioning and emotional stability. In the absence of real rest, there is stress build-up, loss of concentration, and high chances of burnout.
Still, hustle culture redefines the state of exhaustion as a sign of dedication.
There is also a culture change in the interpretation of rest in terms of morality. Traditionally, rest has been organised within religious and communal customs as rituals (shared meals, prayers, or community gatherings). These habits guarded time against productivity. Rest was not something that people needed to explain the reasons for or why it was a social privilege.
The work culture nowadays has eliminated that protection to a large extent.
In the absence of collectivities to enforce rest, each person has to protect rest independently. And in competitive worlds, it is like losing ground to defend rest. Everybody seems to be in the process of getting ahead, and it seems dangerous to slow down.
That is why the slow Sunday seems more and more nostalgic.
The thought of rising without setting the alarm, having a long breakfast or just lying idle in bed and not doing anything in particular is now considered rebellious. It goes against the logic of the culture of productivity where the measure of value is output.
But it is not necessarily all nostalgia—it can be resistance too that comes with that slow Sunday.
Recovery of wasted time refutes the belief that human value should be calculated at all times. In its nakedness, rest is powerless to show itself. It reinstates the concentration, regulates the mood, and lets the ingenuity manifest itself indirectly. Such advantages seldom get reflected on productivity boards, yet they influence long-term well-being.
An insidious cultural backlash is also developing. Such a notion as the idea of a digital detox, a so-called soft life, and planned rest indicates the feeling of increasing discomfort associated with the need to be productive at all times. This is indicated by the popularity of the slow living movements, indicating that individuals have realised that endless hustle can be rather expensive, although it may be challenging to get out of it altogether.
The death of the slow Sunday in a number of ways is a reflection of a greater conflict of contemporary life: efficiency and humanness.
Efficiency desires no hour to pass uncounted. Humanity sometimes requires an hour that does not serve a purpose in any way.
The Sunday slowness may not be quite extinct—it has merely been shifted to the fringes. It endures in little things: not responding to email the day before, not going on a prolonged walk attempting to see it, and not reading with no intention of learning anything useful.
These instances might not seem like much, but culturally it is something bigger.
And that it is sometimes the most radical thing in a productivity-crazed world just to do nothing on a Sunday.