Cheers to three-day weekends. Photo: Hyon Cho/forrent.com
Alas, the glorious institution of Labor Day Weekend is upon us. That means barbeques, beach days and, best of all, 72 hours of (hopefully) no work. No more hunching over a keyboard, eyes watering from a computer screen and Alan from marketing making unnecessary small talk. (“No Alan, I don’t want to hear about your kale salad”). Since the late 1800s, Labor Day has been a welcomed respite, a last hurrah to the summer. And though three-day weekends are a rarity, a recent study suggests that they should be occurring all the time.
The Lancet, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, found that shorter work-weeks resulted in healthier employees. And with better health comes better performance, so it’s a win-win for everyone. The study reports that, “Employees who work long hours have a higher risk of stroke than those working standard hours.” It also notes that stress, as a result of work, can lead to higher risk of heart attacks. Basically, the less time you spend in the office, the longer life you’ll have.
So there it is, definitive proof that work is slowly killing us. With three-day weekends as the norm, rather than holidays only, we’d be a happier, healthier society. Let’s start the revolution! Fight the man! But we’ll get to that on Tuesday – in the meantime, there’s a cold beer and lawn chair with my name on it.
