Please Tell Me, what day is it?
The newspaper wasn’t delivered and left in the driveway on a recent Sunday because of a bad storm. At least we think it was Sunday, but we can’t know for sure because the newspaper wasn’t delivered and the only way we know it’s Sunday is because that’s the only day the newspaper is delivered.
In other words, we have a lot of trouble remembering or even figuring out what day it is.
We’re pretty much ok with the date — today, for instance, I know is February or March something or other. It’s the days of the week that seem particularly hard to keep track of.
I think this is a pretty common problem for people our age. And I don’t think it has much to do with declining cognitive ability. At least I hope it doesn’t have much to do with declining cognitive ability. It has more to do, I think, with changing circumstances.
It was easy, of course, to keep track of what day it was when we were in school. Monday through Friday, we had classes, then we had the weekend all to ourselves, until the end of TV’s Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night, which marked the moment the weekend was truly over and we’d better do that homework for Monday that we had been putting off.
As adults — in the era before work-at-home, on-call all that time, regularly checking email and keeping open the Slack channel — we knew Monday because that was the day we went back to work. And we knew Tuesday because that was the day there was a staff meeting. And we knew Wednesday because that was the day some of us in the office went out to lunch at the pizza place. Thursday was deadline day, maybe, and Friday was everybody getting ready for the weekend and trying to leave early.
Easy to keep track.
But once we’re no longer working, once we’re no longer raising kids, our routine has become less structured and our awareness of what day of the week it is has suffered.
There are no more regular Monday meetings. There are no more Thursday deadlines. No more Wednesday soccer practices for the kids and chauffeuring to piano lessons on Friday and no Girl Scout meetings on Tuesday evenings.
A weekend obviously doesn’t mean what a weekend used to mean because every day now sort of feels like a weekend. There’s no day with alarm clocks to get us up, no day with commutes to make. And daily events can be excruciatingly similar (wake up, coffee, check email, complain to customer service, have lunch with a friend, walk, nap, dinner, maybe do laundry, watch TV, do a little reading, go to sleep).
Without all the external markers, the brain has to work much harder to place itself within the weekly cycle and it frequently appears to get confused.
Today is Tuesday? Thursday? Seems like we just had Thursday yesterday. Could it be Wednesday again? Doesn’t it feel like a Friday?
The particular day of the week doesn’t feel especially relevant anymore, which is probably why our brains don’t make a priority of storing that kind of information.
Today, in fact, actually might be Sunday, but I’m going to go out and check if the newspaper has been delivered so I can be sure.