Why I hate the weekends (2017)

This resonates with me. I love my work, I really like what I do, I think it's mentally challenging, interesting, and important for our world and civilization and I believe I'm compensated well enough. But it's tiring ok? And all I can ever do on weekends is lying on my bed watching netflix. I work 9 to 6 and work out intensely for 2 hours every week day. By the time it's saturday I'm both physically and mentally exhaust. I cannot do anything other than sleeping. Of course this is not a good situation for various reasons: no friends, no relationships, no hobbies. Just work, gym, and recovering from those two. I like this for a lot of reasons (which is why I do it) but I acknowledge that my life is also pathetic. I wouldn't be surprised if I died alone.

What I don&#x27;t understand here: Why can&#x27;t we just <i>work less</i>?<p>I know it&#x27;s not trivial, but it can&#x27;t be impossible either. I doubt he would starve if he got a part-time dev job (are those easy to find? I have no idea). I agree wholeheartedly with all that he said. I think a life of work-home-work without breathing is almost meaningless unless you can have possibly unreasonable amounts of fun and freedom in the job (few if any industries allow&#x2F;demand this kind of work). Indeed if a job allows for fun and freedom markets will usually exploit this advantage to try and push you to work even more (<i>if you let them</i> of course).<p>I&#x27;m still a student but I&#x27;ll certainly look for a job that&#x27;s either totally fulfilling (rare) or allows as much freedom as possible while maintaining a reasonable lifestyle and quality of life.

Some possible solutions:<p>1) Ask for a 30 hour work week, or find a company that can offer this. Your salary should still be high enough to aim for a comfortable retirement at 65.<p>2) Adopt a more frugal lifestyle and increase your savings rate.<p>You need to save a few million dollars to retire with $40-$80k in investment income. It should be very possible to do this with a backend developer&#x27;s salary over a period of 10-15 years, and then you should be able to retire in your 30s or 40s. You should also aim to increase your salary by changing jobs every few years (or get a job at a FAANG.)<p>3) Build side projects or a startup and try to get some passive income (or an exit)<p>Write all your startup ideas down and keep looking for opportunities. It can be hard to build products in the evenings or weekends, especially if you&#x27;re already burnt out from your normal job. So this option works best when combined with part-time freelance work:<p>4) Become a freelancer and work part-time while you work on your own projects<p>Bonus: Move to a place with a very low cost of living.<p>Working 10-20 hours per week gives you a lot of free time and much longer weekends. But it also gives you a lot of time and energy to work on your own ideas.<p>Note that working 10 hours per week is a terrible idea if you just spend the rest of your time working on hobbies that don&#x27;t make any money. If you do that, then you won&#x27;t even be able to retire at 65, and you probably won&#x27;t be able to save money for emergencies. Only do this if you spend the rest of your time trying to build a business.<p>If you can&#x27;t get anything to work after ~10 years of trying, then you should still have plenty of time to go back to a full-time job and save for retirement.

&gt; <i>I feel like my whole life is centered around work. Even though I work a (what is considered) reasonable 40-hour work-week, I feel like too much of time is taken away from me. Not only is it actually being in the office but commuting too. My morning are devoted to getting ready for work: dressing up, packing up a lunch and so on.</i><p>As someone who also works a reasonable 40-hour a week job, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a difference working remote has made.<p>I used to commute an hour each direction in the DC area, and (like the author) spent time preparing meals, getting dressed, etc. I have since moved to the NC area to work remote, and quality of life improvement is incredible:<p>- I can get to work immediately with no commute, and when I&#x27;m done, I don&#x27;t have to get in a car to get home.<p>- Lunch break involves making a healthy lunch in my own kitchen, then reading a book while I eat in the comfort of my own home.<p>- I am a coffee enthusiast, and I love being able to make a french press, pour-over, or cold brew right in my kitchen.<p>- Crappy weather and accidents on the roads no longer have any effect on my workday.<p>- I get the exact office setup I want.<p>- I can go work at a coffee shop, an outdoor park, or even at the beach (all of which I have done), if I want a change of scenery.<p>WRT to the central point: I hate the _concept_ of living for the weekend, and have taken intentional and proactive steps to ensure that I don&#x27;t fall into that trap.<p>Just a few examples:<p>- Get up early, and make time for what matters. I like to work out in the mornings, and also make sure to do any hobbies or side projects during this time, as my brain is fresh.<p>- Make yourself stop working at the appropriate time. This will differ depending on your job and your personal preference, but I draw a line in the sand and do not let myself work any later than 6 PM. My personal time is very important to me, and even though I love my job, I will never choose it over my personal time.<p>- Make sure to do things you like during the week, too. This really just involves not allowing yourself to believe that you can only make time for yourself on the weekends. Sometimes I&#x27;ll get up early and meet someone for breakfast at a restaurant, sometimes I&#x27;ll do a fun hobby in the evening, like rock climbing. If your job is flexible enough you could even step away for a quick break during the day to do something outside, like bicycling or kayaking, if that&#x27;s your thing.<p>edit: Formatting

I used to work a 4-day week (a true 32-hour week, not 4 x 10 or something) and it was the greatest thing I&#x27;ve ever done. All the &quot;weekend stuff&quot; you can do on your extra day, and get two full days off. I can&#x27;t believe how great it was.

I’ve tried to think of a way out of this, but so far none of my ideas are very good.<p>1) Use my spare time to study a more lucrative field, and negotiate a four-day work week. The pitfall here is that I need to spend all of my spare time working, so that I may be able to work less in the future (and it’s not guaranteed that I will).<p>2) Move to a country where the cost of living is cheap, and freelance with international clients. The pitfall here is that I have to move away from all the people I care about. I may also end up introducing more stress into my life by living as a foreigner and relying on a freelance income.<p>3) Invest all of my time into starting my own business (for pitfalls, see 1).<p>4) Negotiate a four-day work week on my current wage, live a much more ascetic lifestyle, and only save a small amount of money for my future.<p>5) Marry into a wealthy family.<p>6) Find a duffel bag with a few million dollars in it.<p>Does anyone have any better ideas?

To add insult to injury I find doing things on the weekend often a chore because everything is so crowded. Around here finding a parking place at the mall, movie theaters, etc is very difficult. There&#x27;s a beautiful state park that my wife and I love. But to go there on the weekend you gotta arrive either at 6am or 6pm. The parking lot fills up solid, complete with people lurking in their cars waiting for someone to leave. Want to get out of town? Be prepared to sit in lots of traffic. I sometimes seriously wonder if living in such a crowded part of the country is worth it.

My technique is to remember where the job ranks in my &quot;give a shit about&quot; list and it&#x27;s not as high as you might assume. I am not irreplaceable, and either is my job. So I try to give a good value for the work I&#x27;m paid to do, but at the end of the workday I flip the switch, as it were, and my life is my own. I am militant about not letting my job control me. I am polite but firm with coworkers and managers, and they respect my off-hours time, and I respect theirs. We all have families so that probably helps.

We moved from a 7 day working week to a 6 day working week about 2000 years ago, and to 5 days about 100 years ago, it&#x27;s time to move to 4 days. In addition the 5th day should be used for lifelong education, people should be expected to learn about all the new things that have been invented since they left school, or refresh what they&#x27;re not good at.

Today I just wasted the second half of the day doing nothing at all; just watching mind-numbing videos on Youtube.<p>I had been working on a side project most weekends for the last 10 years and been particularly busy in the last year so I forgot what it felt like to just waste time. Wasting time feels great.<p>In this cut-throat competitive industry, it does feel like a luxury through.<p>As a software engineer, I can&#x27;t afford to not be on the cutting edge. I have the feeling that if I stopped working for just 6 months, my career would be over.

The &quot;no free time&quot; issue for me is not due to work; it&#x27;s due to being married — which is a choice I made knowing that I would lose a lot of &quot;me&quot; time. Every so often my wife visits family on the opposite coast for a week or two and suddenly it feels like bucketloads of time have appeared out of nowhere. I imagine once I have children (which I hope to have in the next few years), I will feel even more pressed for time, but I accept that this is just the nature of that decision.<p>Everything is really about trade-offs, but I think if you are single, a 40 hour work week is probably not enough to make you feel like you are on a hedonic treadmill. I&#x27;m currently working at my dream company, but over the next few years, my goal is to reach financial independence as quickly as possible via some side project. 95% of startups fail, but at least in the valley, most of these startups are VC funded and have big ambitions. I&#x27;d say if your goal is to simply reach $2-3 million for financial independence, the failure rate is a bit lower for some small project that fills a niche market need.

Ah, someone wrote down some of the reasons I&#x27;m terrified to go back into tech. Not because it&#x27;s unavoidable to be sucked into working a 60 hour week for a soulless company that doesn&#x27;t care other than to use you as cheaply as possible... but because I am afraid I will let it happen to myself again.<p>You know the phrase, &quot;working for the weekend&quot;? From the actual hours in office, piled up non-work responsibilities, <i>constant</i> stress from the job... I was working <i>all</i> of the time for... for what, retirement? That&#x27;s a horrifying thing to think through end-to-end, especially when you step back from your job for a while to realize, in most cases, for most people, <i>it&#x27;s just a job</i>.<p>American culture is masochistically obsessed with attaching human value and worth to &quot;work ethic&quot; or &quot;career success&quot;. It&#x27;s a nice distraction (probably not on accident), but I&#x27;m fairly there&#x27;s more to life and I glad it didn&#x27;t take 30 straight years working to figure that out. And now I guess I&#x27;m repeating it here to try and solidify it for myself.

Huh, for what it&#x27;s worth, this doesn&#x27;t resonate with me at all. I appreciate the author sharing how they feel but really don&#x27;t like the &quot;we&quot;s and &quot;our&quot;s, since they&#x27;re not expressing some universal truth.

&gt;<i>Our lives are high maintenance. We need to maintain our relationships with our spouses, friends and family. We need to take care of ourselves with exercise, hygiene and so on. Our houses need to be kept clean and our fridge full of food. And to be able to do all that, we need work to make a wage so we can pay for what keeps us alive.</i><p>Nothing that a short stint in the developing world doing a non-desk job for a month or so can&#x27;t help put perspective on...

I find the typical work in developer jobs very fatiguing. It involves reading through loads of old code that other people have written over the years, trying to figure out how it all hangs together and where I inject my change in. For some reason that does my head in.<p>Greenfield work is a lot less tiring, but much more rare in my experience. It&#x27;s also a career path of it&#x27;s own and hard to get on. I.e. you need greenfield experience to get a coveted greenfield job role.<p>I am considering getting into tutoring&#x2F;teaching programming and I might find that a lot less tiring, covering the basics X times rather than wrangling the spaghetti code day in and day out.

Once you have kids, you cherish Mondays and weekdays <i>much</i> more..

As others mention here and there in the comments: you can get a 3-day weekend at many tech jobs. It&#x27;s just a matter of asking, and asking in the right way.<p>E.g. this guy I interviewed has been working 4 days a week for 15 years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codewithoutrules.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;part-time-programmer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codewithoutrules.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;08&#x2F;part-time-programmer...</a><p>I&#x27;ve personally not worked 40 hour weeks since 2012, because, too much stuff to do, especially with a family.<p>If you don&#x27;t have negotiation experience, well, I started out a terrible negotiator and eventually figured out how, so you can too. And if you&#x27;d like to skip over all the mistakes and research I did and just know what it takes to negotiate a shorter workweek as a programmer, I&#x27;ve written a book that can help you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codewithoutrules.com&#x2F;3dayweekend&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codewithoutrules.com&#x2F;3dayweekend&#x2F;</a>

Rather than have a job, become financially independent. Work to make money, when you have acquired enough money, take a break. Even if you have to work non-stop to get to &quot;enough to take a break&quot;, it&#x27;s MUCH LESS stressful than being on someone else&#x27;s clock. I look forward to Mondays, that&#x27;s what happens when you become your own boss. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boldanddetermined.com&#x2F;t-g-i-m-thank-god-its-monday&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boldanddetermined.com&#x2F;t-g-i-m-thank-god-its-monday&#x2F;</a>

If the OP&#x27;s post resonates with you and you are a software engineer, consider hiring a part-time personal &#x2F; virtual assistant.<p>I haven&#x27;t heard of software engineers in VC startup land or corporate world hiring personal assistants but in the freelance &#x2F; consulting world it&#x27;s very common and an amazing way to &quot;level up&quot; yourself as a professional. It&#x27;s ok to need help and it&#x27;s ok to hire someone who enjoys helping with personal or professional admin tasks.<p>You can start out with a virtual assistant for a few hundred bucks a month and can find one on Craigslist or a branded service like Zirtual.<p>I have a VA help with routine marketing &#x2F; admin tasks in my business and then impromptu one-off personal tasks like booking flights, hiring task rabbits, booking doctors&#x27; appointments, etc.<p>I know not everyone is in a place to afford this but I think most engineers are if they are thoughtful about their finances. I&#x27;d highly recommend trying it out.

We&#x27;re definitely ready for a 4 day week. It might be the best way to reduce inequality within wage-earners too when you consider how many people are underemployed or are part-time workers who want to work full time - those people stand to massively benefit.<p>However I do think the author is making it sound harder than it is... if you don&#x27;t have kids, I don&#x27;t see how you can run out of time on the weekends to do basic things or not do those things during the week (esp. chores and errands). I also experience a general feeling of malaise thinking about time wasted during the weekends on internet&#x2F;games&#x2F;socializing when I could have been cultivating new skills or working on entrepreneurship but that&#x27;s definitely mostly my fault.

If you work 5 days, 2 day weekend, that’s 150% more workdays than days off. Replace just one of those workdays with a day off, and it drops radically - just 33% more workdays than days off.

I agree strongly with the author’s feelings. Machines and automation have taken on most of the repitive work.<p>Also if the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor is growing, clearly there is room in the budget to relax work schedules for most who want or need it. For jobs that require mostly problem solving, one might argue that a shorter workweek could actually increase productivity.<p>I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I actually started a newsletter for job listings with shorter hours and other related stuff just last week:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;30hourjobs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;30hourjobs.com</a>

This is funny because I&#x27;ve always actually <i>hated weekends</i>. I try to do something &quot;fun&quot; or at least whatever people think of as &quot;weekend-y&quot;, go out for a hike, work out, whatever, but ... most of the time I feel like it&#x27;s just time wasted.<p>I&#x27;d far rather have a six-day work week, or perhaps even seven, and then three consecutive months off per year to do some real travel or something.<p>Pretty sure this is a minority viewpoint, but curious if anyone else feels the same.

This has already been solved thousands of years ago and it’s called Shabbat, one day of the week of true, strict rest. No doing the laundry, no cooking, no driving the car. In general, no creative activities which modify the world in some way.

The workplace is a means of exhausting humans with mundane labor that enriches a few while making the rest suffer. If you work 9-5 a 5 day week or longer, consider yourself a hamster on a wheel. Business does not share the same values us humans share. To see change you must be the change. Personally, if I ran a company or a startup I’d mandate a 3 day work week - Tuesday to Wed if we absolutely had to meet. Otherwise it would be fully remote and you choose your work days.<p>When I first went out on my own, the line between weekends and workweek melted so I always felt like I was working even on weekends. As time went by I realized that I did not share that feeling the author mentions and it feels great! I can go shopping any time, see a movie at 11 am if I want to on a Monday and skip the crowds when everyone is out doing the same things on the same day.<p>Modern workplaces are not built for productivity- they are places where you go to waste time, time that could be spent on yourself.<p>I used to think business would not compete on a shorter work week but then I looked at how I spent time at work - most of t was idle time once you count the breaks, lunch, chit chat, browsing when you’re fried. All of this added up to a significant amount of time no matter the position I occupied. It gets worse when you are in a managerial position. Why on earth anyone would want to subject themselves to wasting time at work instead of enjoying it at home (unless they had problems at home) is not clear. I think we are stuck in this perpetual need of having to outwork the other. To show that we are hard working and will do anything to provide for our families. Except, in many cases more time does not directly result in more money. Sure, you spend more time sitting on your butt and claiming working hours or because your boss demands it, but are you really getting more done? In an office environment I can tell you with absolute certainty the answer is no.<p>So if you are a manager, a CEO or anyone in a position to do something about this insane self-infliction, please evaluate your values, how you think employees spend their time and be the change.

It seems to me, this has nothing to do with a 40 hour work week.<p>This person has overcommitted themselves in their personal life to the point where it is conflicting with their work responsibilities.

I used to think I had no spare time. Now I have 2 kids under 3. It turns out I used to have a TON of time in comparison.

All of this is a choice.<p>You can choose to live a different life. In 20 years in tech, its the rare person who asks &quot;should we?&quot; instead of &quot;can we?&quot;<p>Should you work yourself to death? Probably not. Can you? Sure. Was it a well considered choice to do so?

When I was younger, I had a fulltime contractor job where I only worked 4 days a week, and also had flexible starting times. The freedom was incredible and having just 1 extra day made work vs personal time seem much more equal (4 work, 3 off). I also got more done because longer days allowed me to get into flow more and I suspect most salaried workers already spend more than 8 hours a day anyway.<p>I&#x27;ve yet to really see any other companies do it, and I&#x27;m thinking of instituting that policy in our current startup, but it deserves serious consideration.

I solved most of this for myself purely by relocating closer to work. If you have an hour commute (hour to, hour from), that&#x27;s 40 hours&#x2F;month sitting in traffic being unproductive. That&#x27;s an entire 3 months worth of full-time work in a year. Just eliminating a long commute gives you back a <i>lot</i> of time during the regular week that&#x27;s currently being completely wasted. Now I mostly just work remotely.

My impression is that the author needs to take entrepreneurship more seriously instead of ranting about changing the universe to fit its current comfort zone.

&quot;It&#x27;s Monday, the dreadful countdown has started. You&#x27;re already thinking about the end of the week, and it barely started. As the days go by, you are fixated on Friday 5pm.&quot;<p>I felt this doing data entry for $20&#x2F;hr at Elections Ontario. My single most effective co-op term because it really motivated me to get into a career I love and bust my ass to never work a day in my life again.

When I was younger I had this job I absolutely hated, and for a while I had these really boring, mundane, night-long, recurring dreams about being at that job. It was the worst. Felt totally trapped.<p>I can relate to the feelings in this article. But, for what it’s worth I’ve found that cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and sleep, and exercise, really help.

&gt; I want to spend time partaking in my hobbies on the weekend. However, I often find myself lifeless and staring blankly out the window. My mind is tired, my body is fatigued. By the time I&#x27;m fully rested it&#x27;s Sunday night. At that point, it&#x27;s time to head to bed and start the cycle of work again.<p>This in particular resonates. I used to be in the same sitch. Eventually it became unbearable, a random 3 hours errand would ruin my week. How much could I have accomplished in those 3 hours, I was telling myself.<p>I was also trying to work on a startup in my spare time but it wasn&#x27;t possible. Sometimes, you spend half day fixing some build system and by next week, you&#x27;ll forget where you left off.<p>Eventually I had to quit my job to maintain my sanity. It&#x27;s insane how much you can accomplish in a good week. I recommend it to anyone questioning their current employment situation. Hit me up (email is in my profile) if you want to explore this life style. The crazy thing is that even if you fail, you’ll be ten times the programmer as when you left.<p>Two IRL friends quit their jobs to work on their own startups or freelance. I&#x27;ve also convinced one person here on HN to do the same.<p>Those startup ideas might be more realistic than you realize, if you are given enough time.

I think making time for hobbies really helps reduce the pain of this cycle. I suck at the guitar, but I can play it for 15 minutes or so, and it breaks up the monotony of the day and provides a different creative outlet than I get at work. Even if you have to put off some chore, it’s crucial to make some time to just be alive.

I think the malaise stems more from a personal sense of dissatisfaction than it does the objective conditions of an oppressive work week. Either accept the trade-off, develop a better attitude toward it, or change your life.

I am thinking of launching a course on how to become a UX consultant &#x2F; designer if anyone here designs and wishes to go down that path. Let me know... You can expect 60-150k, work from home.

John Maynard Keynes said that we would be working 15 hours a week by now. That would so great.

Honestly I hate these self-absorbed, live-is-tough posts by Software Developers doing creative work in a nice air conditioned office.<p>Get a real job, try milking a few hundred cows at 6am, work as a cop in a bad city, or outside in construction when its freezing or scorching hot. Not to mention doing it on a 20k wage with a few kids.<p>I get it, figuring out how to get our software working can require a lot of thinking, but compared to most of the people out there its a sweet gig. Stop complaining.<p>Edit: I don&#x27;t want to sound snarky as this is. I realize lots of us do work really hard and don&#x27;t have much time for anything else, but that&#x27;s just adult life.

Oh my, no mention of kids. Just wait how much he hates the weekend after that happens.

Weekends are meant to fulfill obligations.

You don&#x27;t hate weekends, you hate capitalism.

if you don&#x27;t like what you&#x27;re doing, stop doing it

My dad had real weekends. No grocery shopping, no laundry or other chores. He got stuff done, but he didn&#x27;t have to do it and most weekends he truly relaxed.<p>How did he manage this? He had a wife. She did the chores during the week while he worked.<p>Now that women have been told that they should work they do, even if they&#x27;re not particularly good at it. And now we don&#x27;t have weekends. We are single people working full time to support ourselves and we&#x27;re completely trapped by it. What a tragedy.

Tired after a 40-hour week + commute? lol... hormonal imbalance or diet&#x2F;health problem.

LMAO the author complains about all the chores that come with high maintenance life. well, go minimalist.

TLDR: Author doesn&#x27;t have enough time in weekends to rest properly.

The short answer to this, is that this is the lazy form of thinking pestering people&#x27;s minds (especially young) nowadays. People who don&#x27;t know how to plan their lives, finances, time, studies, family, work, health or whatever it is that needs a solution, and blame it on the system. Just like my ex-girlfriend, she used to talk on and on (and on and on, and on again) about &quot;our system&quot;, and then after I broke up with her and she graduated college she didn&#x27;t start working, she is traveling the world for the past 6 months with government welfare that Europe is so stupid to give. As the years go by she will keep complaining about &quot;our system&quot; but she never did anything to improve &quot;our system&quot;, she only consumed. This is called leeching.<p>Take some responsibility &amp; get what needs to be done quickly and well, and you will buy yourself some freedom, nothing in life is free, and it shouldn&#x27;t be, since no one should be working and not getting paid for it.

Get 4 weeks off, then spend it off grid, the more primitive the better, fighting the elements and hunting for food. When you get home you will be really happy just having a warm bed. That&#x27;s for motivation. But then there&#x27;s your brain being completely fried by the end of the weekend, be glad that you do not have a mundane repetitive work (or be glad if you do).

Many software developers are 9 to 5-ers meaning when they get home they don&#x27;t do any more programming and don&#x27;t do programming on the weekend either. They do most of their learning while on the job. These programmers are of course mediocre at best and typically work at slow paced large companies with lower pay but they&#x27;re satisfied with their work&#x2F;life balance and there is nothing wrong with that.<p>If the author is complaining that work leaks into the weekends then perhaps he should communicate with his colleagues and managers to figure out which processes in their workflow can be fixed to avoid that. He also has the ability to jump to another company if he feels his current company is too demanding.<p>Everyone has 24 hours in a day; use it wisely, especially doing something you&#x27;re good at that makes you money but also enjoy.