I wrote a poem for a girl once, back in high school. It was an angsty, acrostic rant about love and relationships and shit, where the first letter of every sentence spelled out “do you want to go to prom anyway”.

I walked away while she read it, trying and failing to stay cool, but I was still within her eyesight when she finished and said no.

My best friend’s getting married next month, and I’m the minister.

Part of me wants to think so; I’m making a lot more money than they did at my age, even accounting for inflation. Aside from my car note, I’m debt-free. All objectively good things.

They had each other though. I’m a few years older than they were when they had their first kid, and they’d been married for a few years before that. I’m alone, and after I had some bad experiences, I don’t bother with dating. Whether that’s “better” than what my parents did or not, I don’t think it’s fair for me to decide.

Bill Paxton, holding hands with a slightly taller Bill Paxton wearing sunglasses. They’re standing in front of a poster for the movie Twister, but the title has been replaced with the logo for the board game.

My roommate made it during a literal fever dream over a decade ago, he was in bed, fiddling with his phone’s photo editor mumbling “I have a vision” over and over again. The tag line “he called me a ne’er do well, he’s dead” was something I said while playing GTA next to him at that time, and he added the quote to the final image.

It’s weirdly cropped since I’ve used it on different phones over the years, here’s what it looks like now.

With our current calendar system, anything other than a 7-day schedule is going to shift from week to week. My schedule at that company was 8 days long, so it shifted ahead by one day each week. Your proposal would do the same, just in the opposite direction. Having employers stick to fixed schedules is a much easier ask than having the whole world change how we keep track of time.

I’ve worked a schedule like this before (4 on/4 off) and while it’s nice at first, it wreaks havoc for long-term planning, since your schedule shifts from week to week.

Whenever I’d try to make plans with friends, I’d have to cancel 75% of the time, because I’d either be at work, or I’d have work the next day and I couldn’t be out late. Extrapolating my schedule didn’t really help anything; there’d be entire months at a time where I simply wouldn’t see my friends with normal 9-to-5s.

3- or 4-day work weeks are great, but they should be fixed in place on the workers’ end.