Sarci-Sense: The Performance We All Do on Weekends 

Weekends used to be simple. You finished the week, you exhaled, you disappeared for a while. You slept a little longer. You met someone you actually liked. You did nothing, which was the entire point.

Now, weekends feel like assignments.

Somewhere in modern adulthood, leisure stopped being rest and became a performance. Saturday and Sunday are no longer empty spaces in the calendar. They are stages. They must be filled, documented, optimised, and justified. The weekend is not something you enjoy. It is something you execute.

And middle age is when this becomes most absurd.

By Friday evening, you are exhausted in a way that sleep cannot fix. You have survived meetings, parenting, traffic, group chats, and the daily administrative burden of being a functioning adult. You tell yourself that the weekend will be different. The weekend will be calm. The weekend will restore you.

Instead, the weekend arrives with plans.

Brunch is booked. A café has been chosen. A short trip has been considered. A family obligation has been confirmed. A friend has texted, “Let’s catch up properly,” which is modern language for “Let’s schedule joy.”

Even rest now needs an itinerary.

The middle-aged weekend has become a strange form of compulsory happiness. You are not allowed to simply be tired. You must do something with your tiredness. You must turn it into an outing. A meal. A movie. A memory. A post.

We have reached a point where doing nothing feels like failure.

The irony is that most people do not even want these plans. They want relief. They want silence. They want a day without having to be pleasant. But adulthood does not permit this easily. Middle age, especially, comes with the pressure of appearing alive.

So you go.

You sit at the table. You order the overpriced coffee. You smile at the right moments. You take the photograph that proves you have a life outside work. Nobody really wants the coffee. Nobody really listens. The latte is just the price of admission into the weekend economy of performance.

Even joy has become transactional.

The weekend is when the middle class performs its version of success. You have worked hard all week, so now you must display the rewards. The mall. The restaurant. The resort. The children’s activity. The carefully curated normalcy of a life that is doing well.

Weekends are no longer about resting. They are about reassuring yourself that your life is not slipping away.

Social media has made this worse, as it always does. You are not just living your weekend. You are comparing it. Someone is in Goa. Someone is at a vineyard. Someone is running a marathon at sunrise, which is perhaps the clearest evidence that leisure has collapsed.

You scroll and feel a vague anxiety that you are wasting your time.

And so you waste it productively.

Middle age is when weekends become another job, except this job pays in photographs instead of salary. You must appear social. You must appear fun. You must appear grateful. You must appear present.

Nobody says it aloud, but the modern weekend is an audition for a life you are not sure you are enjoying.

There is also the family version of this theatre. Middle-aged adults spend weekdays running households like administrative departments. Weekends are when the household must become a happy unit. Quality time must occur. Togetherness must be achieved. Everyone must do something wholesome.

Often, the only person who needs rest is the person organising all of it.

Parents do not relax on weekends. They manage leisure for others. Children have classes. Elders have expectations. Relatives have visits. The weekend becomes an extension of duty, disguised as bonding.

It is extraordinary how little rest survives inside the word weekend.

Friendships, too, have been absorbed into this performance. In middle age, friendships do not happen naturally. They happen through planning. Messages are exchanged like diplomatic notes. “We should meet soon.” “Yes, absolutely.” Weeks pass. Nothing happens.

When meetings do happen, they come with the weight of obligation. You are catching up, but you are also updating. Careers, children, health, property, travel. Conversations become progress reports. Everyone is polite. Everyone is slightly tired. Everyone leaves saying, “Let’s do this more often,” which is the adult equivalent of a lie told with good intentions.

The weekend is full of people, and yet oddly empty.

Even self-care has become labour. You do not simply rest. You recharge. You do not take a walk. You close your rings. You do not sit quietly. You practice mindfulness. Leisure has been turned into productivity with softer branding.

Middle age is when even peace needs proof.

And underneath all this is a deeper discomfort. Many adults are afraid of unstructured time. Silence is dangerous. Silence invites questions. What am I doing. Is this enough. Is this all. So we fill weekends the way we fill our phones, with noise, activity, distraction.

The weekend is not busy because life is full. The weekend is busy because emptiness is frightening.

Some people, quietly, have begun to rebel. They do not attend every plan. They do not post every moment. They do not treat leisure as content. They spend Sundays doing nothing, which is now an act of courage.

They understand something the rest of us have forgotten. Weekends were never meant to be impressive. They were meant to be healing.

The tragedy of middle age is not that life is difficult. It is that life is scheduled. Even joy is scheduled. Even relaxation is scheduled. We have turned our only free days into another form of work.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is this. Many of us are not exhausted because we have too much to do.

We are exhausted because we no longer know how to stop performing.

One day, you will look back at your weekends, the brunches, the trips, the plans, the perfectly documented happiness, and realise something quietly devastating.

You were busy proving you had a life.

You forgot to live it.