Life in Weeks

Days, months and years are astronomy — a rotation, a lunation, an orbit. The week is the odd one out: the nearest sky event is a quarter of a lunation, 7.38 days, and four seven-day weeks land about a day and a half short of the 29.53-day month, so the week cannot follow the Moon without drifting. Being untethered, it is the unit governments have felt free to redraw. Revolutionary France imposed the ten-day décade from 1793 to 1806; the Soviet Union ran five-day weeks from 1929, six-day from 1931, and restored the seven-day week only in June 1940. Both reverted. Under the décade this same century would be 3,652 boxes instead of 5,218.

A year is too coarse to feel and a day too fine to plan around, but a week is the natural unit of a human life: you can still picture what you did last week, yet a whole 100-year span fits in one glance as 5,200 small squares. Laid out this way, a vague "someday" becomes a countable grid — which is exactly the point of a memento mori. Takeaway: even a long life of 90 years is fewer than 4,700 of these boxes.

The matrix packs a century into 52 columns × 100 rows = 5,200 cells, but a calendar year isn't exactly 52 weeks — it's 365.2425 ÷ 7 ≈ 52.18 weeks. Over 100 years that adds up to about 5,218 weeks, so the tidy grid silently omits roughly 18 of them — almost four months of life. It's the same leap-week drift that forces some calendars to add a 53rd week in certain years.