The Four-Day Workweek: Civilization’s Last Reasonable Idea

Thursday, October 9, 2025.

We like to think of the five-day workweek as if it were handed down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone.

In reality, it was carved out by strikes, lawsuits, and a few industrialists who realized exhausted workers were, in the end, bad for business.

The “standard” week is less natural law than historical accident — and a particularly joyless one at that.

So when someone proposes the four-day week, Americans clutch their pearls.

Won’t the economy collapse? Won’t society disintegrate?

No. What collapses is the illusion that we needed 40 hours in the first place.

Why Do We Work Five Days Anyway?

Once upon a time, the weekend was scandalous.

When workers in the early 20th century pushed for two days off, newspapers warned that idle men would spend their free time drinking, gambling, or worse — organizing.

The 40-hour week wasn’t gifted; it was pried loose from America’s tight fisted elites, through bitter strikes and bloodshed.

Henry Ford’s 1926 move to shut down Saturday shifts wasn’t altruism.

It was strategy. Shorter hours meant more alert workers and, conveniently, more time to shop for cars.

Productivity didn’t collapse; it soared. The lesson: whenever workers win time back, life improves. Management panics. And history eventually proves them wrong.

What Happened to the Promised “Leisure Society”?

By the 1970s, futurologists predicted that rising automation would usher in a 20-hour week.

The only problem of the future, they said, would be “too much leisure.”

Instead, we got the opposite. Work hours grew. Leisure shrank. And burnout became the national pastime.

Economist Juliet Schor nailed it in The Overworked American (1992): Americans traded free time for consumption.

Instead we got cheap flat-screen TVs, but no time to watch them. A sort of devil’s bargain.

From Kellogg’s to TikTok: How Hustle Culture Stole Our Free Time

Not all experiments failed. In 1930, Kellogg’s rolled out six-hour shifts.

Workers flourished — healthier, happier, more civically engaged. But management eventually killed it. The idea that employees might have rich lives outside the factory was too destabilizing. It became apparent that management was leaving money on the table.

The Lost Utopia of Six Hours

There was, briefly, a glimmer of sanity in American capitalism. In 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, the Kellogg Company — yes, the Cocoa Krispies folks — announced that its entire workforce would shift from eight-hour days to six. Not as a temporary stunt, but as a deliberate vision of a different kind of economy.

President Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg argued that four six-hour shifts would spread jobs across three hundred more families in Battle Creek.

This wasn’t just about employment — it was about community.

As Benjamin Hunnicutt documents in Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, the idea was to highlight the delightfully subversive notion that capitalism didn’t have to be synonymous with exploitation or endless consumption.

Higher wages and shorter hours could liberate workers for what our Declaration of Independence so grandly promised: the Pursuit of Happiness!

And for a while, it worked. Productivity didn’t plummet.

People used the extra two hours to care for children, take classes, join clubs, even volunteer. Civic life and social bonds in Battle Creek grew thicker richer.

Women, in particular, had more time to manage households and expand into community leadership. It was a practical experiment in freedom — the kind measured not by profits or efficiency charts, but by what human beings could actually do with their lives.

What Happened Next?

Of course, it didn’t last. Nothing utopian ever does.

Management eventually rolled it back, deciding that six hours was too generous, too destabilizing, too much like giving the teeming unwashed masses a taste of self-determination.

But imagine if Kellogg’s model had spread.

Imagine if shorter hours had become the norm instead of a corporate footnote.

Instead of designing workplaces where “flexibility” means checking Slack at 11 p.m., we might have designed a society where free time wasn’t a guilty pleasure but a civic right.

Instead, here we are.

Employers hand out kombucha taps and “wellness rooms” with broken yoga mats, and call it innovation.

Meanwhile, the six-hour day — a proven policy that actually improved lives, marriages, and neighborhoods — is treated as an oddball experiment from the past.

The most radical thing Kellogg ever produced wasn’t cornflakes, it was the bestowal of new cultural paradigm of time and attention. And we Americans somehow managed to piss that away.

Fast forward, and instead of shorter shifts, we got hustle culture — the 21st-century fantasy that exhaustion is a lifestyle brand.

TikTok is now the stage: 5 a.m. “grindset” videos, side-hustle sermons, and self-help influencers bragging about sleeping four hours a night.

The four-day week isn’t just a labor reform. It’s a way to puncture the absurd American cultural performance of busyness.

Other Almost-Utopias We Let Slip Away

Kellogg wasn’t the only one. Across the globe, societies keep testing shorter workweeks, proving they work, and then quietly dialing it back.

• Sweden’s Six-Hour Day
  In the mid-2010s, several Swedish municipalities tested six-hour days for nurses and municipal employees.

  The results? Less sick leave, better health, higher job satisfaction. Patients even got better care because nurses weren’t running on fumes. And then, predictably, budget hawks declared it “too expensive” — as if exhaustion were free.

• France’s 35-Hour Week
  France actually legislated a 35-hour workweek in 2000.

  Productivity remained high, and many workers gained precious hours back.

  But employers hated it, politicians chipped away at it, and today many French employees still work more — while Americans use France’s 35-hour week as a punchline.

  The irony, of course, is that the French still live longer, healthier lives, with more vacation and less stress than their U.S. counterparts.

The pattern is depressingly consistent: societies test shorter hours, discover workers are happier and just as productive, and then retreat because — and let’s be honest — rest makes folks harder to control.

A population with time to think, to love, to organize, to demand more? That’s far scarier to management than overtime pay.

The tragedy isn’t that shorter weeks don’t work. It’s that they do — and we keep pretending they don’t.

Do Four-Day Workweeks Really Work?

Yes — the data is kinda relentless:

• UK 2023 Trial: 61 companies, 2,900 workers. Less stress, better sleep, same revenue. Most firms kept the policy (Autonomy, 2023).

• Iceland 2015–2019: Government-backed trials covering 1% of the workforce. Workers were healthier, happier, equally productive. Today, 86% of Iceland’s workforce benefits (Haraldsson & Kellam, 2021).

• Microsoft Japan 2019: Cutting Fridays boosted productivity 40%. If Microsoft meetings can vanish without consequence, what exactly were they for?

So much for economic collapse. Turns out most “full-time work” is caffeine-fueled email theater. Perhaps AI will upend all our work-life balance norms.

People Also Ask: Common Questions About the Four-Day Week

Do workers actually get more done in four days?

In most trials, yes. Work compresses into what matters. The “efficiency dividend” comes from killing the dead time.

What are the disadvantages of a four-day week?

Industries like healthcare and retail need continuous coverage, so it requires shift innovation. Some employees struggle with compressed schedules if employers insist on 10-hour days instead of fewer hours.

Which countries already use a four-day week?

Iceland and Belgium have national frameworks, and Portugal is piloting. Even Spain has tried it. The U.S.? Still allergic to naps.

Why not three days?

Because three days is kinda utopian. But four days is overdue.

Why Families and Couples Should Care

The length of the workweek isn’t just economic. It’s also relational.

Long hours drain the bandwidth needed for patience, play, and connection. Marriage and family therapists call it the “spillover effect” — job stress leaking into marriages and parenting. Translation: your boss’s obsession with “hustle culture” is tanking your family life.

A Case Vignette

Take one couple I saw recently (names changed, details blurred): she was clocking 60-hour weeks at a Boston firm, he was freelancing and caring for two kids.

Their arguments weren’t about love, they were about time: Who had it, who didn’t, who was hoarding it, who was starved.

Science-based couples therapy couldn’t give them a four-day week, but it gave them permission to cut back on unnecessary “busyness” and reclaim a few evenings together.

That was eventually enough to shift the marriage from survival mode into repair (it took a little under 10 sessions).

A shorter week won’t guarantee harmony. Some couples will spend their extra Fridays silently scrolling in opposite rooms.

But at least they’ll have the option to notice what’s broken — instead of collapsing side by side in silence like drained batteries.

The American Allergy to Rest (Especially in New England)

We’ve been trained to equate exhaustion with virtue. It’s part of our unique American cultural mythos.

The Puritans, bless their dour little hearts, left New England with a permanent suspicion of leisure. Even now, I know Boston executives who boast about “grind culture” as if John Winthrop himself were watching from the harbor.

And yet — here on Cape Cod and in the Berkshires — people flock every summer to experience the thing they swear they can’t afford: time. Long walks, family dinners, the outrageous luxury of an afternoon nap. If we can manage it for two weeks in July, we can manage it year-round.

Why This Matters Now

The 40-hour week was frozen in 1938.

Eighty-seven years later, we still cling to it as if sacred scripture.

Meanwhile, productivity has soared, technology does half the work, and families are running on fumes and pretending like it’s premium gas.

The four-day workweek is not a fucking fantasy. It’s a long-overdue correction.

It says: humans are not infinite resources, marriages are not indestructible, and children deserve parents who aren’t hollow-eyed and depleted on a Friday night.

It’s civilization’s last reasonable idea. Which is exactly why Limbic capitalism will resist it for another 20 years. Meantime, we’ll probably just get more AI porn and stronger weed strains instead.

A Quiet Word to Couples Reading This

If the grind is eating your marriage alive, you don’t have to wait for Congress or your HR department to fix it.

I’m not holding my breath. The fight for the weekend was bitter and bloody. The four-day week might take years to arrive.

But solid, science-based therapy can give you back hours — not by bending the calendar, but by helping you use the time you do have differently.

I see couples in New England every week who are stuck in the five-day grind, exhausted, resentful, and convinced it’s just the way life is.

If you’ve read this far, and ready to find out how much more life you could fit into the time you already have, maybe I can help.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Autonomy. (2023). The results are in: The UK’s four-day week pilot. Autonomy Research.

Haraldsson, G., & Kellam, J. (2021). Going Public: Iceland’s journey to a shorter working week. Association for Sustainable Democracy.

Microsoft Japan. (2019). Work-Life Choice Challenge 2019 Summer.

Schor, J. (1992). The Overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. Basic Books.