Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore
The effects of this on our body politic are concerning. Int might be another factor in this strange debacle we are experiencing now. Also, the Soviet work week was interesting to learn about.
Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society.
Just under a century ago, the Soviet Union embarked on one of the strangest attempts to reshape the common calendar that has ever been undertaken. As Joseph Stalin raced to turn an agricultural backwater into an industrialized nation, his government downsized the week from seven to five days. Saturday and Sunday were abolished.
In place of the weekend, a new system of respite was introduced in 1929. The government divided workers into five groups, and assigned each to a different day off. On any given day, four-fifths of the proletariat would show up to their factories and work while the other fifth rested. Each laborer received a colored slip of paper—yellow, orange, red, purple, or green—that signified his or her group. The staggered schedule was known as nepreryvka, or the “continuous workweek,” since production never stopped.
Socially, the nepreryvka was a disaster. People had no time to see friends; instead they associated by color: purple people with purple people, orange with orange, and so on. Managers were supposed to assign husbands and wives to the same color but rarely did. The Communist Party saw these dislocations as a feature, not a bug, of the new system. The Party wanted to undermine the family, that bourgeois institution. “Lenin’s widow, in good Marxist fashion, regarded Sunday family reunions as a good enough reason to abolish that day,” according to E. G. Richards, the author of Mapping Time, a history of the calendar.
Workers, however, were upset. One of them openly complained to Pravda: “What are we to do at home if the wife is in the factory, the children in school, and no one can come to see us? What is left but to go to the public tea room? What kind of life is that—when holidays come in shifts and not for all workers together? That’s no holiday, if you have to celebrate by yourself.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/
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There's no such thing as "mom and pop" anymore. Not a second of the day goes by where you don't see ads for giant mega corporations like Geico, Progressive, Apple, Capitol One, State Farm, McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, I could go on and on and on. Where we used to have an off switch for this shit, now we don't. And not having the off switch is what is turning society crazy.
Yeah it's not the lack of religion in society as people like Barr and Pompeo would have you believe. It's that giant corporations and relentless corporate greed are the religion. To quote the late great George Carlin - "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it". 
