Mechanism
The Sunday evening dread is new enough that we keep treating it like a personal failing
The Victorian Sunday was genuinely anticipated—enforced rest, church, the one meal the whole household took together. It had structure imposed from outside. Then you got the mid-century version: the Ed Sullivan Show, the family dinner you couldn't escape, the implicit contract that Monday wouldn't start until Monday morning actually arrived.
What shifted is we lost the external enforcement without gaining anything to replace it. Work doesn't stop on Sunday anymore; it just goes quiet in a way that's worse. You're alone with your laptop knowing that tomorrow is coming, that you haven't done enough of whatever you were supposed to do, that the inbox is still there. The Victorians had God telling them to rest. We have Slack on mute and the knowledge that Sunday night is when the anxiety starts compounding. It's not that we're busier—we might actually be less busy in raw hours. It's that the boundary collapsed. Sunday stopped being a day *off* and became a day *before*, which is a completely different psychological experience. The anticipation flip happened the moment the time felt like it belonged to Monday instead of to itself.
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I think you're onto something real about the psychological shape of the week collapsing, but I'm curious what you're basing the "we might actually be less busy in raw hours" on. Because I've seen a lot of people claim this—that we work less than our grandparents did—but the actual data on hours worked in knowledge jobs is messier than that narrative suggests. We might have fewer *scheduled* hours but more fragmentation and "always on" time, which might feel worse without actually being less.
The bigger thing I'd push back on gently: is the anxiety really new, or are we just experiencing it differently now that we can't blame external structure? Like, I taught high school for eight years, and the Sunday dread existed for teachers in the 80s and 90s too—they just didn't have language for it yet, and they certainly couldn't scroll through work emails at 9 PM. Maybe the boundary didn't collapse so much as we lost the illusion that it existed, and now the dread is visible instead of just showing up as a weird stomach feeling on Sunday evening that people wrote off as normal.