What I Learned from Living in England

One of the most important things I learned in England from the people around me was the observance of this thing called a weekend. Most people I know in England rarely ever work on the weekend, which means there are 52 breaks from the work week. The weekend is something I observed for the first 22 years of my life—split across Nigeria and India—but by the time my second year in California rolled around, I’d almost completely forgotten of its existence.

Most Americans, particularly working professionals, are oblivious to the fact that weekends exist and that they repeat every five days. Instead, the concept of the long weekend is acknowledged—a phenomenon where a holiday falls either before the start of the weekend or after it. But the holy grail of long weekends is when there are two holidays, e.g., one on either side of the weekend. In my Californian phase, long weekends were when I actually did something that tore me away from work—a typical getaway being a multi-day backpacking trip in the wilderness of Tahoe or Big Sur or Point Reyes or Yosemite.

This tool says that the US will have observed eleven long weekends by the end of this year. Next year will have the same number whereas there were ten of them in 2024. This means that, by merely observing the weekend (including its extended form), Britain (and Europe, more generally) observes nearly 5 times more holiday days. Of course, Americans do have the option to artificially manufacture long weekends by taking days off either side of the weekend. Assuming an American worker has 14 vacation days and uses them all strategically to extend their weekend, this can amount to roughly 24 breaks from work—less than half that of Britain. Even if Americans’ extra work hours fully explain their higher per-capita output, my position is that this trade-off doesn’t result in a life better lived—at least not for the individual that I am today though I have believed otherwise in the past.

In my first three years in London, I was deeply unsettled by my colleagues and roommates clocking off work when the evening settled in. Typically, 5 pm was considered acceptable to separate from work and leaving the office by 6 pm would rankle them. Contrast this to my final year in California, when I worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I was in my late twenties and pretty much refused to leave the lab early. I also spent nearly every weekend on campus; I partially did this because I knew that, despite my best efforts, I would only have a year there as it was nearly (but not completely) impossible for those without green cards or American passports to secure permanent employment there. The energy there was something else and I intended to spend as much time in it as I could. Of course, my decision to work the weekend away might have had to do with having only $10,000 of fellowship support and a credit card (which I really put to good use) to survive the year in LA.

But I also saw young Americans, in their twenties, working the weekends with a similar fervour; on weekdays, they stayed at work well past midnight and returned to the office by 8 am to continue the grind. I suspect we felt that extended effort would help overcome feelings of inadequacy around senior researchers who had decades of experience but, in my experience, never pressured us to work this way.

Needless to say, when I got to England, I was completely baffled by my colleagues’ complete disengagement from work on the weekend. I once even made a point to a UK-based American entrepreneurial funder that I found it hard to find people with that Californian hustle, which is why London would never have a Silicon Valley-style story.

While I have seen little over these years in the UK to change my opinion, as I age, I have warmed up to British culture’s lesson that there is no virtue in not knowing that such a thing as a weekend exists. I began collecting the germs for this essay on a weekend when I could see an initial cloud of angst coming over me that I was not putting my time to good use—a more “productive” use. My mind drifted to a conversation with a San Franciscan friend from the night before. For the first time in a long time, he had a Saturday that had freed up but wasn’t a long weekend. He had little imagination of how to spend this day; it was too short for a grand camping adventure so he was drifting into the chores that are best categorised as “life admin”.

This took me back to conversations with my British housemates who asked me about my hobbies that were different from work. Back then, I got bristly at this question as I felt we must fully immerse ourselves in one’s vocation; who had time for such trifles? Like my friend, I hadn’t been giving myself space to do other things. But over the last year, I have re-populated my time with things I did as a kid: watch movies on the weekend with some consistency; read novels; journal and blog; squeeze in some sport; or just catch up with friends over a call instead of text. I now get what the word hobbies might have meant and encouraged my lost friend to do something different from chores.

It was a stark reminder of the difference in cultures and the importance of bringing back wholesome practices that we discard over time. That learning to observe the weekend is especially important as one ages so one can find virtue in things besides work. In Europe, it is hard not to be surprised when people decide, even on a bitterly frosty January morning, to amble to the park and then to a market nearby with friends.

As I gazed at the City of London’s skyline from my balcony, on a crisp sunny autumn Sunday morning, I accepted it was the kind of morning where a walk to Haggerston’s Broadway Market for a coffee would be time well spent, not wasted. The weather, unusually pleasant for late October, was the perfect opportunity to exercise the English wisdom that it was, after all, the weekend. That it was okay to allow my welfare to supersede my focus of being productive for the economyOf course I am an academic so many are going to say I am practically useless to the economy already—fair enough.. For too long have I resisted the charms of such a life but, after eight years here, I can say I’m glad that I learned what a weekend is from the British.