Sundays: The World Has Moved On, Part 3 — January 23, 2026 – John Agliata

THE DAILY UPDATE

I was a lad of about 10 years when I was bit in the butt by Muricah’s Christian heritage. I was in the midst of a two-week stay at Rich Martin’s All-Star Baseball Camp on what I think was the campus of Rutgers University but it might have been some other New Joisey college. It was Sunday, which was the day campers whose stays were ending went home and campers whose stays were beginning arrived.

For those of us holdovers, it meant a day without baseball. And that was OK. For the previous six days, we’d had three games/practices a day, and this was at a time when this was not the norm (more on that in another part of this series). We were ready for a day not spend sweating on old-school Astroturf in 110-degree humid heat.

I had just one mission in mind for that day: Spend as much of the allotment of cash my parents had given me for my two-week stay on video games at the campus arcade as possible. And so I walked across campus on that hot summer morning, heavily laden with quarters in the pockets of my too-short 1980s shorts. I remember it being a long walk, but it could have been Jamaica and I wouldn’t have cared. I had a day off, I had money, and there was an arcade. I was going to find it.

And find it I did.

Only to pull on the door and find it locked.

Because it was Sunday. And back before the world moved on, things were closed on Sundays. Yes, even arcades on college campuses.

I was devastated. Those quarters weren’t going to spend themselves, and never again (in those two weeks, anyway) was I going to have the same combination of free time, spending money, and proximity to an arcade. Why did God hate me so?

Today, the only things closed on Sunday are Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, and we know about them because they are oddities in this world that has moved on. Now, if there’s a dollar to make, by God, we’re open for business.

We are worse off for it.

Now please … do not confuse this with a religious argument. I don’t care whether the day is Sunday or Saturday or Tuesday, and I similarly don’t care what you do with the time. Go to a church or a synagogue or a Satanic ritual. Or don’t. I genuinely don’t care. This isn’t about that whole story about God supposedly resting on the seventh day. Time is very much a human construct, so to ascribe it to a creator seems, well, egotistical. But the point remains: A day when everything is closed is a good thing.

What do we know about humans? Well, for one thing, we know they are not generally good at this point in their history of slowing the frick down. All of this technology that now governs our daily existence was originally intended to free us, to give us more time, to enable us to take a few deep breaths and look around at these amazing lives we have for ourselves. But what that technology has actually done is speed things up and keep us head-down and oblivious, grinding and grinding and grinding until we short circuit. It’s not pretty, and it’s not good.

Sundays became a casualty of this. And I blame the Christians. They couched it as a religious issue, and of course, anyone who didn’t believe in their particular brand of holy rollin’ pushed back, arguing the separation of church and state, blah blah blah. This has nothing to do with anyone’s particular vision of the divine. It has to do with chilling the frick out. Because we need it. Desperately.

The truth is, though, that the world has moved on to a point that it really wouldn’t matter if stores were closed on Sundays (or any other day). What we really need is a day when whoever is in charge of the internet switches it off. All of it. Yes, even your GPS. I’d love to combine them… a day in which no stores were open, no youth sports happened (again, a topic for another day), and the internet was shut off.

“But wait. That would shut down my streaming TV.”

Fine. Go outside. Read a book. Play a game. Lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling. I don’t care. Just stop. Stop what you’re so busy doing all the time. Stop it. Take some time to plan what comes next, to think about what just happened, to put everything into greater context. Save your Twitter rants or stupid, inane lip sync videos for another day. Just stop.

So that’s my challenge: Stores aren’t going to close, and the internet isn’t going to shut down. There’s money to be made, y’all, and by god, we’re going to make it! But that doesn’t mean you have to participate. Put the phone away. Lock it up and give someone else the key. Do the same with the remote. And your internet router.

Only then will I listen to you tell me about how busy you are and why you don’t have time for friendships and other real-life things that make us better humans. It’s amazing what we have time for when our time isn’t being taken up with so much bullshit.

Just leave the arcades open on college campuses holding youth baseball camps. Deal?