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Saturday mornings are employees’ touchstone. They're the motivation that keeps us going throughout the week. When the alarm goes off Monday morning, we long for Saturday, the day we wake up when our body tells us to, rather than the timer. Because it's Saturday.
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Over the last couple of years, Saturdays have been a blessing for me. I usually prefer an early start. It can either be a lavish breakfast with my partner or preparing a picnic for a morning at the beach. Other times, I'll hop on my bike and pedal toward the hills, or I'll shake off the week with some calisthenics and stretching. If I'm feeling lazy, I'll relax, read a book, or listen to some music. When I'm lucky, I can't wait to get out of bed and start writing about an idea I'd been mulling over throughout the week. Even getting out of bed to clean up, do the laundry, or go to the supermarket elevates me to a state of eudaimonia, if only because it's Saturday. It doesn't matter if it's a beautiful sunny day or a rainy winter morning—if it's Saturday, I'll find the pleasure in it.
But not this Saturday. I opened my eyes, and the usual joy and enthusiasm for what the day would bring were replaced with a sense of anxiety. It was something I had been carrying from the night before. There were so many things I wanted to do during the weekend, I wasn't sure how I was going to cram them all into those precious 48 hours. I knew I couldn't do them all, so I was going to have to choose. I got out of bed and went for my daily morning stretch to try to get rid of an impending sense of discomfort. At least for those 15 minutes, it went away.
After my stretch, I made breakfast and started to consider the options. I fancied taking my bike out for a spin, but the morning air was a harbinger of the high temperatures that were soon to come. If I hadn't slept in, it would’ve been a beautiful early ride, but it was too late to go out and not suffer the heat. I beat myself up for a while for not having set my alarm the night before—the night before, I’d said to myself the next day was Saturday and I should give myself a break from the clock. I tried channeling my inner Kierkegaard—“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, and you will also regret it.”—to let go of the decision I’d made before going to bed, but the anxiety I’d woken up to inched its way back.
At first, I pretended I hadn't noticed the subtle unease that was my morning companion, and in an act of self-preservation, I prepared coffee. Instinctively, I knew the smell, taste, and ritual of a fresh brew would bring me some relief.
I sat on my balcony, sipping my coffee with my cat purring on my lap, considering the delightful options I had for the rest of the day—it was an Instagrammable moment: #Blessed #Caturday #SimplePleasures. From a distance, it looked like I was enjoying my day of rest, but inside, it was turmoil. My mind was in a thought cycle that was difficult to escape. Should I still go out for a ride anyway? If not, what should I do instead? Lounge and read for a couple of hours? But that wouldn’t leave time to write. If I go for a writing session, what should I write about? Maybe what I need is to relax a while with my partner and be lazy. But then I won’t get much done, and I'll regret that come Monday morning.
It was a loop I was trapped in for more than an hour. My day of rest, what should have been a time of restoration and recreation, had inadvertently become an inescapable malaise of inaction. I didn't want to do any of the things I wanted to do. I had two days to live my life, and they were slipping away.
In a moment of lucidity, I decided to listen to a podcast. Maybe that'd help get my mind off things. Next on my playlist was a DianaUribe.fm episode my partner had shared with me years ago, where Diana discussed censorship. She explained how, in 1982, the Argentine Junta had censored all music in English because it was the music of the enemy. At the time, Argentina was engaged in an armed territorial dispute—war—over the Malvinas Islands with the UK.
In hindsight, it was a petty measure. What else could you expect from a Junta led by greedy torturers and alcoholics? And like all measures, it had unexpected consequences. Censorship during the Junta's government between 1976 and 1983 was a fact of life. The beautiful thing about ideas is that even under the heaviest suppression, people always find creative ways of expressing them. Argentine artists who were part of the Movimiento de Rock Nacional got ample practice in hiding in their lyrics messages that expressed everything that was wrong with the totalitarian regime that ruled the country. Censoring music in English only amplified their voice. During the war, it was all you could hear on the radio.
The disastrous Junta leadership was defeated within a couple of months. A lost war, together with years of violence, torture, censorship, and economic hardship, loosened their grip on power in the country. That, and the activism, art, novels, poetry, and music that evaded censorship through creativity and metaphor, had gotten through to the Argentine people. They were given a glimpse into reality, and they didn't like what they saw. They wanted change. They demanded freedom of speech.
This process wasn’t unique. With the printing press came editions of the Bible in vernacular languages. This meant that those who could read could make their own interpretations of the Bible that ultimately led to the Reformation of the Church in the 16th century. Playing rock music on the radio, filled with coded anti-dictatorship messages in Spanish—a language all Argentines could understand—caused a schism in Argentine society. The consequence was a reformation of the state and the introduction of liberal democracy. Furthermore, that music was exported throughout Latin America, catalyzing social change throughout the region. It was the South's equivalent to the hippie movement of the sixties in the North.
Modern Western democracies boast about their defense of freedom of speech. It’s a value that is contrasted against oppressive regimes where individuals who question the status quo are persecuted and silenced. In short, the Western idea of freedom crystallizes in the idea of freedom of speech. We say we are free in the West because we are free to say what we think. Censorship is a flagrant violation of our basic rights. That the US Constitution—the model for most modern liberal democracies—enshrined this right in its first amendment illustrates the important role it plays in Western society. I'm very critical of the West, but I admit that I'm all for freedom of speech—although I wouldn't mind shutting up a conspiracy theory uncle or two. I fully agree we should all have the right to respectfully and responsibly speak our minds. A venezuelocracy-a-la-Putinesca doesn't sound like utopia, and I wouldn't favor totalitarian strategies to maintain social cohesion.
As the podcast came to an end, I realized why my Saturday morning had become a whirlwind of anxiety and paralysis. It was a natural reaction to how our social structures of productivity impose limits on our agency. I froze because I remembered that five out of seven days of the week I have little time or energy to dedicate to the things I enjoy and that help me understand the world in different ways.
Riding my bike connects me with nature; it helps me see there's a life beyond the city. Reading brings me closer to other ideas, stories, and worlds. Listening to music takes me to an abstract plane where I can witness beauty in new ways. Writing forces me to challenge my own ideas. Spending time with loved ones allows me to live beyond my individual experience. The common thread is how all the things I enjoy help me see existence in a different way. They add richness and complexity to my experience and thoughts. Frozen, sitting on my balcony, I felt a force beyond my control. Something paralyzing. Something that took me away from all those activities that enrich my thinking. My mind was being censored. By having to work all day, every day, instead of doing these things I enjoy and help me see the world in different ways, I understood that I was being denied freedom of thought.
Centering our lives around labor and productivity has pernicious consequences. We have less time to create our own understanding of reality and to connect to our surroundings. We don't have the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to question existing constructs. It's disheartening if you think of it. If the way we live is causing destruction and pain, hope lies in our capability to create new ways of living. But if we can't access our own thoughts, how are we going to imagine new worlds? There’s no way out. We're doomed. And that's why I froze on the balcony. For a moment, I had lost hope.
It’s easy to despair. Thought censorship is effective because nobody wants to live their lives thinking that they don’t develop their own ideas, so we appropriate the thoughts that are given to us. These inherited worldviews can range anywhere between concepts such as private property and collective ownership of capital. From pro-life to pro-choice. Far-left to far-right. In a sense, free speech is a cosmetic matter. What good is freedom of speech if all we're capable of saying is someone else's story?
Yes, my moment on the balcony was a dramatic overreaction typical of my usual neurotic self. Instead of perpetuating my inherited ideas of productivity and wanting to do it all, I just need to channel Søren and decide whether I should ride my bike or not, read a book or not, write or not, listen to music or not… whether I should marry or not. But that limits solutions to the individual. However, mental censorship in a world that’s caught up in labor and productivity, keeping us too busy to think for ourselves, is a collective problem.
This is where the story of censorship in Argentina gives us hope. If you pay attention to those who are censored and listen to what they’re saying, you can find messages between the lines that speak of different ways of living. This is what the Argentine people did in the early ’80s. Although we all participate, one way or another, in the labor market, some workers are more oppressed than others. These are the people who will find the urge to creatively combat their oppression. For an obvious reason, they're the losers. They're the ones with the most to gain—and least to lose—from change. They're the people with the highest incentive to apply their creativity to express their discontent, imagine new ways of living, and force change.
These are the people we should pay attention to, to discover new imagined worlds. Worlds with less pain and less destruction.
Which collective comes to mind when thinking about the losers in today's labor force? Women. From the glass ceiling to wage inequality, women have historically gotten the short end of this stick time and again. They carried—and still carry—the weight of unpaid labor and servitude throughout the centuries. This has seriously limited what women can do, and also what they can think and say, over the ages. A true censorship of the mind.
It's no wonder that throughout the 20th century, a period with multiple waves of expansion of feminist thought, women were increasingly incorporated into the labor market. Yes, that brought them a certain degree of financial freedom from men, but it also incorporated them into oppressive labor structures. In other words, whenever women found new ways to speak their minds in the last century, the way to quiet their voice was to make them work more. More time working, means less time thinking, and less time thinking means there’s less to say. Even more so when labor is unfairly paid, if paid at all.
Against all odds, these censored female workers find ways to bypass oppression and think and speak their minds. Groups like the Domestic Workers' Movement, the Wages for Housework Movement, or La Vía Campesina are just a few examples. It's in the ideas of these creative thinkers where we can find hope for change, for a shift from productive labor to meaningful labor. Creative ideas for new worlds will come from female workers and other disadvantaged collectives such as migrant laborers, people with disabilities, or the neurodivergent. As we said in It's Here, hope lies in the creativity of the underdog.
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I go through the same paralysing indecision whenever I have a day 'off'. Whatever I do, I feel like I've shut the door on something equally important.
Really relatable read.
There is a real psychic violence in a life arranged around repetition, pressure, inherited ideals, and the gap between what sustains the system and what sustains the soul.
The system stays alive by teaching us to repress whatever exceeds productivity. Push, keep your head down, internalize the pace, feel guilty for not achieving, call it normal. Humans were never meant to have such choice and restriction at the same time.
No wonder rest so often fails to restore. Rest itself has been colonized by the logic of optimization and scarcity. Even spaces like Substack can become miniature versions of the same pressure economy.