French Sundays Won't Save You (But This Might)

In today’s biohacked, super-optimised, podcast-fuelled society, where the shortest route is always the best route, anxious people can now find solace in the French. No, not in their excellent baked goods, but in the way they spend their Sundays. Largely: off. Off work, off study, off hustle and betterment, without any need to maintain productivity. The French, apparently, are showing us a type of weekend where we can finally be idle. 

Nowhere else on earth has idleness been shown to us before, at least not in an Instagrammable way. The stripes and fresh bread, the long lunches and strolls around the market. Cosplay as a Parisian, and you’ll begin to finally ace your downtime. But make sure to snap it for the ‘gram first or it doesn’t count. 

Or, perhaps, we can admit that for most of human history, Sundays have been sacred. Even industrial Britain shut up shop and changed pace for the day. But we’re too young, too brain-fried, and too disconnected to remember what uncharted leisure looks like.

Our always-on, anxiety-inducing, downtime-ruining champions of social media have created an aesthetically-pleasing cultural export out of wasting time. The irony. Perhaps instead we can see this trend for French Sundays as a reminder that this is what happens when we’re all a bit fucked. We’re justifying our downtime, optimising our commutes, unable to even eat a croissant without checking our emails. We’re permanently available. Of course we need to make an aesthetic out of the antidote, of course a chic new secret to switching off is going viral.

We don’t need a linen shirt and a wicker basket, we don’t need to document our aimless-strolling and long lunches. What we need is permission to waste time again. Sundays or, perhaps any day of the week, with space and time for not much, no optimising, zero content, no buying or working but a simple return to the state of human being again.

We’ve become so deprived of the feeling of this that we’ve mistaken it for a stereotype. It’s not. It’s a deep human need to inhabit our own lives without extracting value from every inch.

It’s not French Sundays we need, but a recalibration of how we show up in our lives. 

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