Is blogging going to kill me?
That's what the New York Times seems to be suggesting:
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Um...not me.
The problem seems to come from unoriginality -- if your blogging strategy is being the absolute first person to point to some other story (the examples in the story are mostly tech writers), then you have to be awake and waiting for it.
Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco -- hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.
"I've got a background getting punched in the face," he said. "That's why I'm good at this job."
Let's just say I'm not in that kind of competition.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks