Sociology

Ask why the week has seven days and most people will shrug, then invent a justification after the fact — something lunar, something biblical. The honest answer is that nobody currently alive decided it, and neither did anyone in living memory, which is exactly the condition under which a decision stops registering as a decision. The calendar, the alphabet, the seven-day week, the nation-state, the categories you reach for without noticing you’re reaching — all of it was built by someone, for a reason, at a moment in history you could in principle point to. And every one of them has reached a state where asking who built it, and why, sounds like a strange question to be asking at all. …

I grew up inside a convenience store, and a convenience store has no holidays. It has shifts. The calendar that organizes most people’s lives — the long exhale of Friday evening, the dread of Monday, the warm collective pause of a holiday — never reached behind the counter. Christmas was a high-traffic day; people who forgot something always needed somewhere open. New Year’s Eve sold ice and cigarettes. A Saturday was a Tuesday with more beer. My parents never asked, “any plans for the weekend?” because there was no weekend. There was only what we call, with no irony at all, business as usual. …