Going to the office was a result of the 19th century’s need for centralized data processing. Probably 90% of office jobs no longer actually require anyone to commute to the office anymore, as we’ve invented something called the Internet. We still go to the office because managers aren’t very good at measuring output so they use the proxy of “how long Mary has been sitting in her cube.” Which is sad.

Secondly, who cares if a person works five days per week? We should be concerned with output, not hours. No company reports hours on its Income Statement, but all companies report the results of output.

As for avoiding the weekend rush, I suspect the problem here is social. In an ideal world people would stagger their work-related activities (done from home, thus massively reducing time wasted and fuel burned) but would still wish to coordinate their leisure time with family and friends so there’s not a full-on perfect solution to this particular problem. But a non-commute output-centric workstyle would vastly reduce the “everyone to the beach on Sunday” problem.

None of these rational approaches will be taken, of course, because we’re human and we humans always keep doing today just whatever it was we were doing yesterday, and we’ll do it all over again tomorrow. Social change takes decades and decades, on those rare occasions it happens at all. We merely change the tools we use to do precisely what we were doing before. What, by way of example, is social media in its essence but mere electronic graffiti? We’ve been scrawling on walls for millennia; scrawling on a virtual wall is just the same behavior.