Andrew Sullivan on blogger burnout
Andrew Sullivan quit blogging a few months ago, saying it was for health reasons.
I can believe it. Blogging’s stressful. On the other hand, Sullivan had a staff of helpers, huge traffic as motivation, and made good money at it into the bargain. He did push a lot of posts up there—the article says 40 per day, seven days a week, for the whole site. Since I stopped reading Sullivan long ago (although he’s actually indirectly responsible for my start as a blogger), I don’t know whether that’s true or how many were actually written by Sullivan, but I’ll take his word for it that he worked very hard.
But this seems wrong:
Here’s what I would say: I spent a decade of my life, spending around seven hours a day in intimate conversation with around 70,000 to 100,000 people every day, ” Sullivan said. “And inevitably, for those seven hours or more, I was not spending time with any actual human being, with a face and a body and a mind and a soul.
Sullivan never had comments on his blog. So I don’t know what this “conversation” consisted of or how he would define it; perhaps from the emails he received. But compared to most bloggers who have comments, it’s not all that much of a dialogue, it was really a monologue for him.
I would also submit that readers are “actual human beings, with faces and bodies and minds and souls,” even though he wasn’t seeing them or encountering them face-to-face. But one can assume they exist as separate human entities rather than just as creatures in the Sullivan cranium. If his “conversation” with them is “intimate,” they’ve got to be humans, although perhaps by “intimate” Sullivan means that he’s spilling his guts to them.
Or perhaps he means writing about intimate things, such as Sarah Palin’s uterus and most recent childbirth experience (or non-experience, according to Sullivan, who did not believe that Trig was her biological child). At any rate, Sullivan says:
I couldn’t imagine blogging the next election,” he said. “I will not spend another minute of my time writing about the Clintons. Period. Or the Bushes.”
With that, I can deeply sympathize/empathize.
Yep.
It’s better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.
Out of the blue
and into the black
They give you this,
but you pay for that
And once you’re gone,
you can never come back
When you’re out of the blue
and into the black.
The king is gone
but he’s not forgotten
This is the story
of a Johnny Rotten
It’s better to burn out
than it is to rust
The king is gone
but he’s not forgotten.
It makes me nervous, Neo, to hear you talk about burnout. Hope you’re not hinting at any of your OWN plans.
For Neo it would be better to reduce scope in favor of longevity. There is much to be done on our most strategic perils. Think of the world in the 1930s and of Orwell’s thought control through propaganda. Thank you for today’s exposure of The Telegraph’s distortion by using “Asian” men.
Here is more proof that Hillary is despised by many on the left. No wonder her numbers keep dropping.
Makes me nervous, too.
Such a bedwetter. But good riddance.
Neo: You can’t burn out yet; things are just beginning to get interesting!
So long Andrew; we hardly knew you.
Sullivan needs to be burned out.
carl in atlanta: granted none of us want Neo to suffer burn out, but “things are just beginning to get interesting!”. Really? How about depressing, desperate, dispiriting…
Know who isn’t burned out? VoxDay.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-duel.html
But he’s not American, for clarifications.
I’m getting burned out from commenting.
My blog suffers.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/06/delusion-and-deterrence.html
A view on a different front of the same war.
KL: I didn’t say things will be good, fun or stress-free. I do believe that the next 18-20 months will be among the most interesting times (politically, historically) of my lifetime. Remember the old Chinese curse!
Given the times we’re all living in, any blogger called ‘neo neocon’ simply must stick with it “for the duration”. If it comes, burnout can be acknowledged and surrendered to on February 1, 2016: by then the war for the soul of America will have been won or lost, and we will all know the outcome.
Sorry for being presumptuous, Neo, but you’re doing important work.
carl in atlanta: I must be older than you. I’m one of those people that thought that the election in Nov 2012 was going to be the most consequential one of our lifetime. (or one could argue that this was true in 2008.)
Many people argued then that the fate of the country was on line. And then, a few days after the 2012 election, people experienced group amnesia, dusted themselves off and were ready to think there was still hope. I did not experience this amnesia. I’m happy for you optimists! Just not there myself. My country has been taken over by leftists and barring some type of selective catastrophe, I don’t see her glory days returning.
Narcissus, thy name is Andrew. A monologue is not a conversation for normal people.
OT: That didn’t take long….
Lou Lumenick (NY POST “film critic”) is now saying that the movie Gone with the Wind should be banned.
Un-freakin’ believable. They’ll do it, too.
The entire South is being scapegoated viciously and globally for the deeds of ONE MAN. But hell, all the haters needed was an excuse.
Rush Limbaugh has this to say:
[I]t’s not gonna stop with the Confederate flag because it’s not about the Confederate flag. It is about destroying the South as a political force. It’s about isolating, targeting, and identifying the South as Dylann Roof. Not Charleston, South Carolina, the South. That’s what the leftists’ effort on the Confederate flag is. …
And I’ll make another prediction to you. The next flag that will come under assault, and it will not be long, is the American flag. … If you take a look at the timeline of progressive events, their speed and rapidity with which the left is conducting this assault on all of these American traditions and institutions, if you don’t think the American flag’s in their crosshairs down the road, you had better stop and reconsider.”
And this from John Hinderaker, Powerline:
“It is no coincidence that the South is now the most patriotic region of the United States. That is the sin for which liberals hate the South: not some fictitious affection for a long-gone Confederacy, but a very real love of country—our country—today.
It is the South’s current patriotism, not its 19th-century rebellion, that drives the Democrats’ hate, and for which the South will now pay a terrible price.
I don’t know, maybe the Democrats calculate that they never again need to carry a single Southern state. That seems like a bad bet to me.”
–John Hinderaker, Powerline
Actually it’s a very good bet. The North has always had a lot more $$$ and a lot more people, and they crushed the South before: they can easily do it again. We’re pretty much in the position of the Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia.
No, I’m not planning to quit. As for burnout—sure, sometimes I get tired, sometimes my energy is higher and sometimes lower, but I don’t plan to follow Andrew Sullivan into the blogger sunset in the foreseeable future.
I had some back and forth email with Andrew Sullivan, back in I’m guessing late 2001 until whenever it was that he turned on a dime against Bush over gay marriage (which had long been an obsession of his, a matter in which he had a personal investment). When I chastised him over this, he wrote back to say that his opinion of GW Bush had been changing, which I really didn’t think was borne out by the evidence.
I respected him as an excellent editor of the New Republic during some of the years in which it was a very good magazine whose editorial I agreed with by and large.
I for instance informed him exactly where to find some writings of Susan Sontag, who I was very familiar with but whose work Sullivan confided he’d never really read. Sontag’s two collections of essays from the 1960s seemed to me essential reading, even if you ended up strongly disagreeing with some of what she said (as I did then and still do).
History has often been rewritten as to who said what in the early days following 9/11. Many were reflexively anti-American and anti-war as a default position, irrational and emotional, wishing to relive what they saw as the lovely days of Vietnam War protest, the stars of which were never challenged nor forced to defend all the harm their posturing had caused millions of evidently inconsequential Vietnamese.
If you ever need it, Neo, take a sabbatical or vacations. I’d recommend Thailand and some great massage up in Chiang Mai. Just make sure to send us a Post Card. Everyone needs a recharge, especially one who feels obligated to satisfy the needs of readers. Live LIFE and smell the Roses, Neo.
If you ever need a vacation, neo, go to Newark.
You’ll suddenly feel better about your own life.
I won’t miss Sully — like you I quit reading him years ago — but I would miss you if you disappeared from the web. I know I’m not alone in that. Many of us out here appreciate the effort you have been making and look forward to reading your expressed thoughts. Keep it up, kid, and know that your work is not being ignored.
Yay!!!
Sounds like a wasted decade to me also. If he had taken comments and responded to a few, he might have gotten to know the minds and souls of a few people who took some interest in his thoughts. incidentally, I never visited his blog, so I don’t know what I have been missing.
The entire South is being scapegoated viciously and globally for the deeds of ONE MAN. But hell, all the haters needed was an excuse.
The Democrat party was never going to merely forgive the South for betraying eugenics, racism, slavery, or the Democrat party line. You knew it to be true. They destroyed the lives of many Southerners merely for disagreeing with Democrat politics and religion.
No amount of staying loyal to Democrat propaganda and tradition tying the KKK to Forrest, raising up Lee, hating Sherman, or anything else of that nature post Reconstruction was ever going to earn Southerners “forgiveness” in the eyes of the Democrat party. They were always going to get you back for not toeing the Democrat line, for not dying in their wars with patriotic glee and fulsome praise.
It’s easy to discard what I said about the South being entirely loyal to the Democrat cause since Civil War I, it’s something else to be convinced by the Left slamming a boot in your face. That’s an argument of an entirely different force level.
I’ve thought about a religious blog, but can barely reply to the few comments my FB posts generated without getting weary. You have my utmost respect!
Hi Neo,
Just a quick thanks for your blog. I read virtually all you write and only occasionally post a comment. I have been quite amazed at your persistence when you have a relatively small following, at least as judged by the # of comments per post. I don’t mean this as insulting in the least. ( As you know, many popular blogs like Ace get hundreds of comments for every post–tens of thousands per week). I have always admired your willingness to keep going without the kind of reinforcement that comes from a higher profile. You have very good insight and a great community here.