In my teens, Sundays revolved around going to church and pretending to pay attention, then picking up Happy Meals at McDonald's for lunch, and visiting grandparents in the afternoon. Grandma would always make traditional Chinese dishes that no one even hears of these days, while Grandpa would give the three of us warm Carnation milk filled with two spoonfuls of pure sugar. We would get a sugar rush and crash terribly afterward. It was a mandatory family day; it wasn't necessarily fun as kids. There were no video games or cartoons on TV, but it was always filled with love, delicious food, and old tales from my grandparents.
In my university days, Sundays revolved around finishing laundry, buying groceries, packing, and catching a ride back to campus two hours away. The ride back was always in the evening, when the blinding setting sun shot straight into your eyes. Once we got back, we would procrastinate finishing the assignments due on Monday and play Warcraft until 2 a.m. Sundays always felt like a break from school, healing homesickness, looking forward to what Mom had packed in food containers for the week, enjoying the freedom of living abroad and being an adult.
Between my 20s and 30s, Sundays meant extending the weekend as long as possible from the workweek. I'd be checking out the latest restaurants and bars, golfing, camping, traveling, experiencing being newlywed, capitalizing on our youth and the ability to recover from sleep deprivation. Sunday also meant I could be in Milan or Vegas, traveling with the bosses, hustling and shooting to be the top dog, soaking in elite status, the glam life, and achieving new career heights. Sundays were full of life, full of challenges, full of rewards.
In my 40s, Sundays are no longer fun. At the beginning, Sundays meant grinding hard to grow the company, sucking it up, working late, and taking all kinds of work just to make a name. But at least it seemed worth it, because I was building something from scratch. Sundays also meant dealing with life trauma, mental illness, COVID, and dealing with entrepreneurial hardship. Sundays in my 40s were just about burnouts, overdrafting life, and sacrificing health and happiness for a chance to make a name.
As I am approaching my half-millennium, Sundays have become depressing, dreadful and hopeless. Every Sunday is just a repeat of miseries. It's sad because you actually plan Sunday as a work day, to catch up on things you couldn’t finish during the week, because during the week, you spend 80% of time dealing with other people’s crap. You convince yourself working Sundays will be peaceful, uninterrupted, focused, and you can finally get some shit done. But the reality is, Sunday also means major procrastination. Because it is the day when your body needs rest from the week’s hustle, catch up on some sleep, and literally do things for yourself for once. You feel guilty not working, and you feel more guilty working. You are constantly in the “stress-relaxing” purgatory, you neither feel dead or alive. In the end, it manifests into something cyclical, you started to hate your life, your work, and knowing that tomorrow is Monday, you chronically hate Sundays.
Sundays are the absolute worst.