Monday standups at my jobs abroad often started with weekend stories. One colleague was raising chickens and had strong opinions about coop design. Another was rebuilding a car engine in his garage, piece by piece, over months. Someone else was three months into a watercolour course.
I've also worked with engineers in their 50s and 60s still actively coding, contributing, and enjoying what they do. That kind of longevity doesn't come from grinding harder early on. It comes from never needing recovery weekends in the first place.
When I thought about my own weekends — and those of most people I'd worked with in India — the answer was usually rest. Sleeping in. Catching up on the week. The weekend wasn't for building something new. It was for recovering from what just happened.
The Default I Grew Up With
I grew up in an environment that is constantly competitive — school, college, jobs. There's always a sense of needing to stay ahead, or at least not fall behind.
That mindset carried into my work. I put in extra time, stayed available, responded quickly. Not always because someone asked me to — but because it felt necessary to stay relevant. Over time, it just became the default. Weekends became the space where I recovered enough energy to do it again on Monday.
When I started working with teams in the US and the UK, the thing that surprised me wasn't work-life balance as a concept. It was how unremarkable it looked in practice. People logged off on time. Kept Fridays light. Planned their evenings without work spilling into them. It wasn't a perk or a philosophy. It was just how work fit into life.
What Weekends Reveal
Colleagues who spent Saturdays rebuilding parts of their home weren't taking a break from work. They had energy left over because work hadn't consumed it all. The hobbies weren't an escape — they were what life looked like when work stayed in its lane.
What I've Taken From This
These patterns come from how cultures evolve — shaped by competition, opportunities, and expectations over time. Neither is something individuals chose. But the thing I keep coming back to is what I saw in those senior engineers: the ones with the longest, most productive careers weren't the ones who worked the hardest in any given year. They were the ones whose weekends looked like living, not recovering.