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Vote on Oct 14!
Mar
7
(2006)
OK, maybe not really. But at least I know I’m not alone in thinking about rethinking my approach to this whole blogging/always-on thing. First Stephen dropped his H-Bomb (hiatus, not hydrogen, but the effect on the edublogosphere would have been the same either way), then I see that others are thinking about this (with more clarity than I can muster).
Lanny’s posted some great thoughts on the topic:
Part of the problem is simply that those who burn the candle brightest are likely not leading full rounded lives but instead getting so absorbed in the moment and the possibilities that may exist that they are inadvertently putting themselves on an emotional roller coaster with little reserve left over for dealing with the tough but pragmatic issues that emerge from “day job” part of their lives. Periodically, I’m in that boat.
Yeah. Me too. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s an amazing thing. Sometimes it’s just an endlessly draining distraction. The problem is, it’s impossible to tell when it will shift along the spectrum…
I’ve got no plans of going on hiatus, but I think it’s time to take the hint and at least think about how I want to continue with this stuff. Balance is a good thing…
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7 Responses to “Better to burn out than to fade away”
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It’s because our virtual lives are so much more connected and interesting than the daily drivel that is supposedly what today’s real life is. Here I can have a conversation with intelligent people any time I want, in real life, it’s never on demand. Real life is just a bunch of people thrown together that a forced to perform in order to justify their economic existence, what we call the day job. Online, we’re here because we enjoy being here, its good here, there are like minded people here dicussing higher ideas than what is daily lives. This is truly a free space built on ideas and nothing else, there are no rules, there is no can’t, there is nothing but freedom. Unfortunately, they’re conflicting things, our real lives and our virtual lives. There are only so many hours in the day and those hours take up so much of the time, that if we spend the rest online, then where is the time for the loved ones…? Sometimes I think we’re all just the types of people who became monks in monasteries and this online space is our monastery. my few cents.
By the way checking out Lanny’s blog, it’s cool because he’s from the very place I grew up… Urbana-Champaign, it’s funny but I guess I have been close to post-secondary education pretty much my entire life. My dad was a professor than a student and as soon as he stopped being a student, I became one. Funny, we’re all connected somehow… and even funnier that I am hijacking D’Arcy’s blog as my own…
(I hope you don’t mind too much).
Sami - you can hijack my blog any time you like.
I guess I’ve just been having this weird problem trying to reconcile the distinction between my online (free/open, idea-driven, sharing, reflecting, meritocracy, etc…) and offline (project-driven, budget-driven, bureaucracy, etc…). It’s feeling more and more tempting to just spend more of my time in the more rewarding and enriching online “world” - but that’s not very healthy, especially when the online stuff doesn’t pay my mortgage, etc…
Sami writes,
Real life is just a bunch of people thrown together that a forced to perform in order to justify their economic existence, what we call the day job. Online, we’re here because we enjoy being here, its good here, there are like minded people here dicussing higher ideas than what is daily lives. This is truly a free space built on ideas and nothing else, there are no rules, there is no can’t, there is nothing but freedom.
I don’t know that we’ll ever get all the way to this in higher education itself, but part of the reason I became a professor is because I sought exactly this kind of community, and valued (and wanted to be part of) the effect such communities can have on societies themselves. When “day job” starts to encompass the very intellectual activity of a university, and my interactions with colleagues becomes politicized, fraught in many directions, and one in which the greater good vanishes from sight, I begin to despair of the possibility of such community–and wonder when the online world will become its own version of that despair.
A gloomy thought, my friends, but it seems that human beings always bring the serpent into the garden with them…. I hope I’m wrong, and I must say with D’Arcy and Sami and Lanny that the online community is where I most often go to get my batteries recharged.
Hmm, I’ve got a slightly different take on this. When I was doing Econ theory research full time, I would get quite intense about working on my model and figuring it out but when that was done I’d do something different - play bridge, go to the golf course, read a book, something that was entirely unrelated.
Now, after I write a blog post, I go to sitemeter and look at who else has referred to it. So I find D’Arcy’s post and the comments of Sami, D’Arcy, and Garnder. The collegiality is great and that we can connect this way certainly has a power to it, but now I’ve not moved onto something else. I’m still living in my post and my online life. I’ve gotten narrower.
I think the effect of getting narrower is something like that of a drug addiction. We’re looking for the next high. And so many other things pale by comparison and are not as intense.
In the first post I didn’t mean to disparage the day job - I think it can be good and interesting (or not, it can go either way). I meant to say that our patience is no longer there because of this always on thing that D’Arcy pointed out, so we’re more likely to feel irked by the irritants in that job and less likely to be thankful for the fun and engaging things about the work.
Hello, D’Arcy,
Your post sparked some thoughts, which I posted here.
Cheers,
Bill
Interesting thoughts. Most of us seem to be too caught in with our jobs we somehow miss what\’s going on around us.