Whatever Happened to Friday Night?

The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.

When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG.

He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun.

At least, that’s what he observed about the early 2000s, the earliest data he looked at.

In the years since, the “‘heartbeat’ of social life” has grown fainter. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); Americans have been spending less and less time with their friends over the past two decades, a trend that started well before the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, and has continued long after restrictions were lifted.

But looking across the week, Caren found that, starting in the mid-2010s, the biggest loss of friend time happened on Friday nights. (Saturday hangs have also declined a bit, but are still “nearly double the weekday level,” he wrote.) Now Friday— Friday! the day workers thank God for, the day that Rebecca Black sang about , the only day when Robert Smith is in love—looks no different from a common Tuesday.

Its social pulse is mild, subdued.

“Friday night in America has become just another weeknight,” Caren wrote in the study. [ Read: One reason people are spending so much time alone ] Weeks are a strange temporal unit, Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied the relationship between time and social life, told me.

The day, the month, the year—all of these have a basis in nature.

The seven-day week, however, is a completely human invention.

The unique flavors of each day of the week are also creations of human culture.

Monday isn’t the start of the workweek because any inherent rhythm of life says it should be.

Humans arbitrarily decided that.

And it didn’t have to come with a negative connotation—but we all know that “a case of the Mondays” isn’t a good thing.