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‘Tis the Season to Feel Anxious Over Your Blog

As the end of another year arrives, personal bloggers take stock in their lives. Unlike professional bloggers, their blogs are a labor of love. Sometimes, they begin to realize that that they have neglected their real lives in order to satisfy their blogging obsession. Their real friendships have disappeared, their marriages have broken up, they were fired from their job for blogging during work hours.

Some just need to take a break, like South Florida’s beloved Babbling Brooke.

“Today it became clear to me how much I am neglecting other aspects of my life. I have not been working out or taking care of myself. I have been staying up too late and waking up too early in order to spend more time on my computer. I have ignored phone calls from friends to write comments or posts, or even just to IM. But most of all, I have personal aspects of my life that need to be dealt with, and unfortunately I can’t deal with them here.”

Should we feel sympathy for these stressed-out bloggers?

No!

I call these personal bloggers just plain selfish. When they take a break, it makes every other blogger insecure about all the time THEY are spending doing this crazy thing that doesn’t earn them one penny.

Just as each personal blogger has his own style, each blogger gets anxious about his blog in his own unique way. For instance, Schuey, the writer of the Parisian-based Domaine Absurde, puts a European, existentialist spin on things:

“I don’t like my blog anymore. It has become a thing with a life of it’s own more and more drifting away from what it was intended for.

What was the main purpose of it?”

Like Sartre, Schuey asks the big question: “Why am I blogging?”

Of course, most bloggers overcome their blog depression. Others do not. The blogosphere is filled with bloggers who have woken up one morning — and just stopped blogging, as unimaginable as that sounds.

These events can cause shockwaves, as if a friend had died.

I still get a little teary-eyed when I read The Belligerent Intellectual’s eulogy to New York’s blog darling, Hermitude in NYC, in his own NY blog, The Daily Dump.

“It’s hard losing a friend, but it’s harder losing a friend you never knew, mostly because you don’t know how to say goodbye. Literally, you don’t know how to reach them in order to say goodbye. And even if you could reach them, you would have to say something like, “Hey, Hermitude? The Daily Dump misses you.””

Some take the term “Old blogs never die, they just fade away” completely literally. After he gave up blogging, SAC at Sacramento is the New New York actually had the text and images of his blog fading from existence, as if a corpse was turning to ashes. But some bloggers do not really want their blogs to die, despite saying so. Every time someone takes SAC off their blogroll, he seems to write JUST ONE MORE POST. Is it that hard to give up personal blogging?

Yes.

By the way, for those of us not depressed over their blog: If you’re in our Nation’s Capitol tonight, go join the DC bloggers in their Year-End Blog Bash, 7PM at the Eyebar. (thanks Brando)

This entry was posted by Courtney Gidts on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 10:22 am and is filed under Underrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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