How the Shopify CEO started a debate about the start of the week

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What is the first day of the week?

Would it surprise you that a Canadian tech honcho has an unusually strong view on the matter?

There are two basic positions, pro-Sunday and pro-Monday, as different as their namesakes, the Sun and Moon.

Dimanchists hold that the week begins on Sunday. In Canada, they are backed in this by most calendars, which put Sunday on the far left progressing to Saturday on the far right.

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Lunartics say the week begins when the work does, on Monday morning. Sunday goes with Saturday, famously paired as the weekend, and that comes right where it says in the name, at the end.

This is newly topical because Tobi Lütke has taken a side. On Monday, which was either the first or second day of the week depending on your view, the CEO of e-commerce company Shopify and one of the biggest Canadian names in tech, posted the following: “The first day of the week is Monday. I lived in North America for 23 years but I’m going to die on this hill. Sunday as the first day is just crazy talk.”

The expression to “die on this hill” literally means heroically defending strategic high ground from enemy advance. In practice, it means taking a comically unyielding position on a finicky matter of style, like the Oxford comma or whether you should put ketchup on a hot dog. He’s not really going to die.

Lütke is referring to the fact that the world is bizarrely split more or less cleanly and evenly between a week that officially starts on Sunday in North America and South America, and a week that starts on Monday in Europe and Asia, with some major exceptions like Mexico, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and India, local variation in Africa, and a few Muslim countries that start on Saturday.

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So for the modern international man of means, this can lead to miscommunication at the Dimanchist-Lunartic borders about when weeks begin and end.

For most people, though, this question usually matters about as much as whether a hot dog is a sandwich. It seems simple and silly. But it likewise conceals variations and sometimes even contradictions in fundamental worldview.

(Of course a hot dog is a piece of meat between sides of bread, but then is a burger also a sandwich? Once you concede that by this logic a taco is a sandwich, you’ve basically satisfied the reductio ad absurdum argument and you’re back at the beginning. Socrates has won again. Nothing is certain but your own ignorance, and that you’ve got a wonky concept of sandwich.)

“What is the first day of the week?” is that sort of question. Every possible answer is wrong. But like many such fundamentalisms, these wrong answers are also deeply felt, and can inspire melodramatic visions of martyrdom on hills.

Tech moguls, for example, full of confidence and flush with money, are forever trying to reinvent the basics. But routine dies hard, and ritual rarely vanishes completely.

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To say when a week starts, presumably you have to know what a week is. This astrologically themed seven-day quarter month is a basic division of the Gregorian calendar, a Babylonian-inspired Roman relic that has been fiddled and fussed with over the centuries, and is now so finely tuned but still imperfect that it uses not just leap years but leap seconds to correct itself.

This system also carries the mark of pre-modern Christian efforts to calculate the date of Easter so that it roughly tracked the lunar designation of Passover, when the events in question happened, without actually being locked to it. Still today, the date of Easter is calculated by reference to both a full Moon (lunar) and the spring equinox (solar).

Part of the problem is that a solar year (one Earth orbit around the Sun) has twelve lunar months (one Moon orbit around Earth) of about 30 days each with about five days more left over, so over time, solar and lunar calendars fall out of step, taking Easter with it, eventually to the point of heresy.

The most successful effort to eliminate this Christian influence was the wholesale reinvention of the calendar in the French Revolution, with its unwieldy proposal for ten-day weeks and new months named for the seasons, like Thermidor and Fructidor.

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But that did not last, and history suggests you can’t just reinvent the week by fiat. People know what day it is no matter what you tell them.

This is especially so for people whose week is marked out by observance of a Sabbath or otherwise holy day, like the Muslim Friday, the Jewish Saturday, or the Christian Sunday.

Conflicts, when they arise, can quickly get awkwardly philosophical, even theological, and they are not easily solved even by reference to the Book of Genesis, in which God rests on the seventh day, but doesn’t actually say what day that was. Following the commandment to keep it holy, Jews have marked this Sabbath day as Saturday, making Sunday the first day of the week. This also became the tradition for Christianity as it separated from Judaism, but in that case it marks the reported day of Jesus’ resurrection, and is sometimes called both the first day and the “eighth day” to preserve that link to the Old Testament commandment.

The Lunartic view that the week starts on Monday is a more modern, secular, capitalist notion, reflecting the primacy of labour and economy. The global standard on time notation, ISO 8601, which states Monday is the first day of the week, was only issued by the International Organization for Standardization in 1988, long after these cultural norms had been established. So in that sense, although “Monday first” is the standard for proper notation, it is no more definitive than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an American publication, which defines Sunday as “the first day of the week.” The Oxford Canadian does the same but the Oxford English is more circumspect, defining Sunday as “the day following Saturday and preceding Monday, traditionally regarded as the first day of the week, and usually considered (together with Saturday) as forming part of the weekend.”

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Got that? Sunday is the first day of the week, and comes at the end.

This is the big ontological weakness of weekness. A week is a convention. A week purports to be an objective natural phenomenon, like a day or a year, but what it is really depends on how you look at it.

And not just how you look at the waxing and waning Moon, or the annual cycle of stars on the horizon, or the Sun rising higher and lower in the sky, but how you look at your own life routine, work, school or otherwise.

What is the start of an endlessly repeating cycle? Which point on a circle comes first?

Numerical years only happen once, so their first days are obvious. No one debates when New Year’s Day is. It comes with the calendar. (There are different calendars in modern use, some in religious contexts, but most countries agree for civil purposes.)

Months make it easy, because they don’t immediately repeat. So in a few days, the first day of September will be Sept. 1, which this year happens to be a Sunday. Score one for the Dimanchists.

But that means the great annual back-to-work end-of-summer Labour Day festival — a beginning that is also an end — will be on a Monday. That’s a point for Lütke and the Lunartics.

Although of course it’s also a civic holiday, so the first day of that week will be Tuesday.

That’s a point to Socrates.

Editors’ Note: An earlier version of this story named the wrong company in the headline. National Post regrets the error.

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