Friday Future Reads : Joe Sanok’s Thursday Is the New Friday

 

Welcome to Friday Future Reads, my weekly series on books, culture, and the futures hiding in plain sight.

Reading the Future: When Even the Week Is Made Up

Friday Reads : Joe Sanok’s Thursday Is the New Friday

I’m reading Joe Sanok’s Thursday Is the New Friday, and the first chapter opens with a simple but destabilizing idea: the seven‑day week is invented. Not cosmic. Not natural. Just a cultural choice that hardened into “normal.”

Babylonians used seven days. Egyptians used eight. Romans used ten. The modern 40‑hour week didn’t exist until Henry Ford standardized it in 1926. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee it: the rhythms we treat as fixed are actually engineered.

And the moment I hit that section, something clicked:  

Star Trek never had weeks.

Across decades of canon, no one says “next week” or “this weekend.” They live by stardates a deliberately abstract, non‑Earth‑centric system. It’s not just a sci‑fi flourish. It’s a quiet signal that in the future, our industrial time scaffolding doesn’t matter anymore. The Federation isn’t running on a Babylonian inheritance or a Fordist workweek.

Sanok argues that because the week is invented, we can reinvent it.  

Star Trek imagines a world where it’s already been reinvented.

And that’s where it loops back to real life. Reading Sanok made me realize I’ve already been drifting away from the traditional week without naming it. As a freelancer, Tuesday has become my Monday … the day I send pitches, reset my workflow, and start the “real” week. It wasn’t a grand decision; it just evolved as I built a writing life that doesn’t map cleanly onto a corporate calendar. Sanok would probably say that’s the point: once you see the week as a tool instead of a rule, you start shaping it around the work instead of the other way around.

Star Trek’s absence of weeks becomes a reminder that the future doesn’t have to run on the same clock.  

Sanok’s book becomes a reminder that the present doesn’t either.

So here’s the question I’m sitting with today:  

What time structures do we treat as natural that might actually be optional?

What do you all think?

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Renee Guill Reads the Future