One study found that volunteering actually makes people feel they have more time, not less. A good weekend usually involves more than just passive leisure, like spectator sports or binge-watching The Crown. What's more edifying are activities that generate meaning or purpose.

I know Stephen King is uncompromising on the idea that writers should practise their craft every single day, and it clearly works for him. Personally, I relish a day off with some boredom; it gives me space to feel the world, observe, stir up the epiphanies, which I need if I'm creating fiction. On the other hand, I'm a big advocate for beauty and creativity on the weekend, which can be incredibly rejuvenating.

We know that people who work without breaks get tired, introduce errors, get sick and miss out on life. Make no mistake: those staff room hammocks are designed to keep you in them on the weekend.

On a societal level, what happens to community when people don't have time to gather or connect, in person, not just over social media? Not having time off becomes a public-interest issue. It means the erosion of social bonds, less civic contribution and participation. Loneliness is on the rise in North America; we find ourselves too busy for true connection, prioritizing work over life.

It used to be that wealthy people were the leisure class, and having time off was a status symbol. That's switched now: being busy and overworked is the reality for many white-collar workers, and there's a kind of perverse currency to that, competitive busy-ness. At the other end of the income scale, there's a swath of lower-wage workers who are underemployed or unemployed, with too much unwanted leisure, and zero status for that. For shift workers, devices mean they're accessible in ways they weren't before, susceptible to that call from the boss to log more hours.

We know that our bodies suffer from overwork and lack of leisure: anxiety, mental-health issues - we're not designed to work more than about 40 hours a week. Our systems wear out and the quality of the work suffers. After 50 hours, it crashes and burns.

When we don't get that escape from our work selves, I think we feel its absence on a deep, almost primal level. Leisure is uncommodified, unoccupied time where we get to be truly free, so feeling bad about missing the weekend isn't just, "Damn, I didn't make it to the mall!" It's a profound loss.