Blogger Burnout.
A frequent topic here, first visited on January 15, 2009, Add “Blogger Burnout” To The List Of Blogger Ailments. For those of you keeping track, that would be about 3 months after I started Legal Insurrection.
Three months! Even then I realized that being a blogger could be about the most burning-out of things.
After a while, I got Sick and Tired of Blogger Burnout Stories:
Okay, blogging is tough. We get it. Great Grandma and Grandpa had it easy, with rotary phones and all (“You mean your Great Grandparents had a phone?”).If I hear another blogger complain about blogger burnout, I’m going to scream….Let me guess, you worked the fields all day, so you don’t have the strength to push down on the keyboard with your bloodied, swollen fingers?… Haven’t you figured it out, there is only one original blog post which, like the source yeast at the Guinness brewery, has been kept alive for generations so that others may cut from and paste to it.It’s not rocket science.
Yet I endured. Somehow. Somewhere. There was a place for us. Somewhere, a place for us in this internet.
How did I deal with it? By making fun of people who suffer from blogger burnout, and not worrying that the voracious content-consuming beast needed to be fed again.
When Don Surber called it quits in April 2012, I thanked him for his service guarding the walls:
I understand it. I really do.I often joke about blogger burnout, but it’s a diagnosed condition for a reason.The feeling that your blog is all that stands between the Great Mainstream Media-Nutroots Conspiracy and the abyss can create imagined pressure.If only I could do one more post about XYZ it would change everything. Damn it, no one is listening to me!Independent conservative bloggers are a dying breed, I’m sorry to say. They either burnout, or they join an established website.Yet the walls still have to be guarded by independent bloggers who bear a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom, and while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, you want us on that wall, you need us on that wall.Thank you for your service, Don.
When Don returned in August 2013, my spirits were lifted.
Now this. It may be too much.
Andrew Sullivan has burned out. (Again)
Sullivan posts today, A Note To My Readers:
One of the things I’ve always tried to do at the Dish is to be up-front with readers. This sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw; sometimes it just means a monthly update on our revenues and subscriptions; and sometimes I stumble onto something actually interesting. But when you write every day for readers for years and years, as I’ve done, there’s not much left to hide. And that’s why, before our annual auto-renewals, I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future….Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). ….The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again…. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book….When I write again, it will be for you, I hope – just in a different form. I need to decompress and get healthy for a while; but I won’t disappear as a writer.But this much I know: nothing will ever be like this again, which is why it has been so precious; and why it will always be a part of me, wherever I go; and why it is so hard to finish this sentence and publish this post.
Ah, the old “I want to have an idea and let it develop” excuse. Can’t be a blogger and do that (as your humble author gets itchy that this post is taking too long and he really wants to hit “Publish” right away, but he’s letting the ideas develop and wondering how long it has been since we last turned a post live and whether Amy and Kemberlee have anything in the “Pending” folder in case the ideas take a little longer to develop than is currently anticipated, as he also ponders taking the advice so many have given to “write a book, just do it, you’ve already written it,” it’s just spread out over 5000 blog posts and it will be like no time at all to just hire someone to comb through years of your writing and try to assemble it into something coherent, as if one can both a blogger and book writer be, and the fact that others have done it proves I’m just lazy and a procrastinator — sure, I’ll just pound out a 250-page book like it’s a 250-word late night blog post about some YouTube video by a woman in a bathtub slurping Fruit Loops from a tub filled with milk, proving that in America anyone can be a success, except for bloggers…. but I digress.)
I don’t want to be that person.
So I’ll continue to guard the walls.
It’s lonely up here, but someone has to do it.
[Featured Image via Sussex Friends of Israel Video]
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