It is Sunday evening. I have never liked Sunday afternoons. Not as a child, not as an adult, not now. There is a particular quality to the light on a Sunday at around four o'clock — something that has always carried, for me, the shadow of Monday morning. School beginning again. The performance resuming. The brief suspension of ordinary life coming to its end.
I do not think I am the only one who feels this. I think most people feel it and almost nobody says it out loud. Because saying it out loud would require admitting something uncomfortable — that the life we have built, the routine we inhabit, the week we live through is something we are enduring rather than choosing. And that is not a thought most people want to sit with on a Sunday evening.
So instead they say they are okay.
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I have been thinking about where the Sunday dread comes from. Not the immediate cause — the meeting on Monday, the unfinished work, the week ahead. The deeper source. The feeling that predates any specific Monday, that was already present in childhood before I had meetings or deadlines or anything worth dreading in a practical sense.
As a child, Monday meant the performance session was beginning again. Five days of doing what was required, demonstrating what was expected, earning the right to two days of something else. The weekend was not rest exactly — it was the reward for the week. You suffered the five to deserve the two. You carried the bag to school every morning and left it outside on Friday afternoon, and for two days you were free of it, and then Sunday came and you could feel the bag waiting.
What I did not understand as a child, and what most adults never fully examine, is that the bag never actually leaves. You carry it on Saturday. You carry it on Sunday. You carry it to the beach and to the dinner and into the sleep that is never quite as restful as it should be. The performance does not stop because the working week stops. It just changes costume.
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"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) |
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There is a cultural layer underneath this that is worth naming. The idea that suffering precedes deserving — that you must endure something to earn something — is not a universal human intuition. It is a specific cultural inheritance, particularly strong in Protestant northern European tradition, that spread through the working culture of most of the developed world. The Protestant work ethic, as Max Weber described it in 1905, connected labour not just to economic necessity but to moral virtue. Work was not what you did to live. Work was what proved you deserved to live. Idleness was not merely unproductive. It was sinful.
Most people today have no conscious relationship to Protestant theology. But the feeling — that rest must be earned, that enjoyment requires prior suffering, that the weekend is a reward rather than simply two days of a seven-day week — that feeling is the cultural residue of ideas that shaped the working world for centuries. You carry it whether you know it or not. Most people never question where it came from.
Monday morning arrives. Your colleague says good morning and asks how your weekend was. "Good thanks, how was yours?" Two people exchanging confirmation that the suspension is over and the performance has resumed. Nobody asks what you actually did, what you actually felt, what you actually needed. The question is a ritual, not an inquiry. The answer is not information. It is a signal that you have returned, you are functional, you are ready.
And almost nobody notices the strangeness of this. That with a finite number of Mondays available to us, we have organised our collective life around the ritual performance of okayness at the start of each one.
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Almost nobody questions the structure either. Five days of work, two days of recovery, repeated until retirement or death, whichever comes first. The French work thirty-five hours a week and are treated as an anomaly — envied, slightly mocked, evidence that another arrangement is possible but also somehow unrealistic. Most people in most countries accept the forty-hour week not because they examined it and found it reasonable but because it was the arrangement they were handed and questioning it feels like questioning gravity.
John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that by 2030, economic progress would allow a fifteen-hour working week. He was not wrong about the productivity gains. He was wrong about what we would do with them. We did not take the surplus as leisure. We took it as more. More consumption, more output, more performance. The fifteen hours became fifty. The bag got heavier. The Sunday dread got quieter and more persistent.
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Underneath the Sunday dread, underneath the performance of okayness, underneath the bag that never quite leaves — there is something else. The weight of the life that is happening while you are performing the life that is required.
From childhood we carry things forward that were never resolved. The family dynamics that shaped how we see safety and love. The school failures that became stories about our intelligence. The friendships that ended badly and the relationships we did not try hard enough or tried too hard. The choices. The ones we made and regret, and the ones we never made and still wonder about.
I have met people in their fifties who still dream they cannot graduate. The exam they cannot pass, the class they have somehow missed all semester, the degree that will not come. The psychologists call this performance anxiety dreaming — the brain processing accumulated pressure through the most available symbol of evaluation from the past. But I think it is also something simpler. The feeling that you have not yet done what you were supposed to do. That the performance is ongoing and you are still not sure you are passing.
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"Life is the sum of choices we made and regret, and choices we never made and wonder about. The wondering is usually worse." — N. Caglar (Charlie) Boluk |
The performance of okayness is the surface management of all of this. You are asked how you are and you say fine because the alternative — actually answering — would require a conversation that neither of you has time for, that the Monday morning context does not support, that might make both of you uncomfortable with how much is actually being carried beneath the surface of a normal week.
So you say okay. And the other person says okay. And the week begins.
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I do not have a clean resolution to offer. The Sunday dread does not disappear when you name it. The performance of okayness is partly necessary — not everything needs to be said, not every Monday morning is the right moment for honesty. The bag is partly real, not just cultural conditioning.
But there is something in the naming that helps. Recognising that the Sunday feeling is not personal weakness but a structural feature of the life arrangement most of us inherited. Recognising that the okay is a performance and not a verdict. Recognising that the choices not made and the choices made are both part of a life that is still being lived, not a report card being graded.
Next Monday morning, when someone asks how you are, you do not have to say anything different. But you might notice what you actually feel underneath the okay. And you might notice they are probably feeling something similar underneath theirs.
That noticing, quietly, is enough. It is more than most people manage on a Monday morning.
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This week's insight The performance of okayness is not dishonesty. It is the surface management of everything that cannot be said in a Monday morning corridor. Underneath it: the Sunday dread that was there before you had anything to dread. The bag that never quite leaves. The choices made and regretted, and the choices never made and still wondered about. Naming what is underneath the okay does not fix it. But it is the beginning of carrying it more honestly. And that, quietly, is something. |
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