It’s really hard to imagine getting “burnt out” from this. It sounds exactly how many people actively enjoy spending their free time: surf the internet for fun and take a few minutes sharing a couple cool links with your friends.
Firstly, I believe you underestimate the amount of work Jason does and the amount of stress he is under.
I've read Kottke.org since I was a kid, and it's the only blog I still regularly read. There's a reason it's the only website I've looked at everyday for the majority of my life: consistent excellence. Anecdotally, whenever Jason has a guest writer come on his blog, I can tell before I even read the by-line. It's just not the same quality.
And that doesn't happen for free. I imagine it takes a huge amount of work and thought to successfully curate The Whole Internet into something that people actually want to read for 24 years. Remember that his livelihood depends directly on driving traffic to his website — there's no safety net or wiggle room. This sounds incredibly stressful to me.
Secondly, in another comment you claim that because other people with different jobs might be burnt out from those jobs, it is not reasonable for Jason to feel burnt out from his job, and therefore his sabbatical is unwarranted.
This makes no sense. Anyone can get burnt out from any job, and if they have the privilege to do so (and I do agree with you that it is a privilege), they should take time off. In a similar vein, if someone suffers from depression, that person should seek therapy if they can, regardless of whether someone else has life circumstances that are worse.
It makes no sense to prevent someone from taking time off (or seeking therapy) just because their life isn't as bad as someone else's. Instead, we should advocate for better working conditions (or access to therapy) for those who cannot afford the privilege.
If Jason simply wrote that he's sick of maintaining his blog and wants to try something new, that would be perfectly fine.
>I imagine it takes a huge amount of work and thought to successfully curate The Whole Internet into something that people actually want to read for 24 years.
I disagree. Plenty of prolific Reddit and Hacker News posters do the same thing in their spare time.
>Anecdotally, whenever Jason has a guest writer come on his blog, I can tell before I even read the by-line. It's just not the same quality.
Isn't that because they usually post more long-form original content (e.g. https://kottke.org/tag/Tim%20Carmody) than cool links?
It's also clear that Jason has other things going on in life and wanting to clear your plate and reset is very human and understandable.
Losing motivation for a project and moving over to new things is very different from a burn out.
Yeah you're probably right, though it's so annoying when people can't contextualize the usage of terms like "burn out" -- what's "high stress" or "a longer period?" Isn't that subjective?
> Losing motivation for a project and moving over to new things is very different from a burn out.
Is it though? I googled "burnout" and got "Burnout is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped." If someone says the reason they are taking a break is because they are burned out, who is anyone to say that's not what they're experiencing?
If you've heard of Chinese water torture, it's one little drop at a time over a long period of time -- seems entirely plausible that 24 years of being in non-stop curation mode could make someone feel exhausted and constantly swamped.
It's not the surfing and posting links. It's the knowing if I don't surf and post sufficiently interesting links every day, I can't afford my health insurance. The stakes are much higher in the latter.
is true for literally everyone except the independently wealthy. It is a lot easier to not stress over for someone for whom "the activity itself" is a non-demanding job, than for someone whose job is inherently extremely emotionally or physically draining.
As an extreme example, suppose my parents bestowed on me a trust fund. It affords me a monthly allowance that lets me live an upper middle class lifestyle without having to otherwise work. The only requirement to get this allowance is to have an earnest phone call with my mother for an hour each week. Failure to do so results in the trust being revoked. Saying that I'm "burnt out" from "knowing if I don't call my mom this week, my whole income disappears" would be absurd. The ease of my carefree lifestyle is more than enough to offset the mild stress of having to remember to call my mom on a weekly basis.
The parent comment was, essentially, "Why is doing X stressful for Kottke who does it for work when I do X for fun and don't find it stressful at all?" And the answer is... Kottke does it for work and you do it for fun.
It's on the level of someone saying they're "malnourished" because they had to give up a daily diet of Michelin Star-level restaurant food.
Wish I had the luxury to tell my boss , hey I'm burnt out, be back in 6 months or so.
I just get the sense that his interest in it is waning, and he doesn't want to just "check the box" every day. It's his right. Just because some people live in terrible conditions, doesn't mean he can't be sick of his job.
I'm curious, would it have bothered you as much if he'd just said: "I'm sick of this blog and I'm quitting it?" because that's basically what he did, except he promised to come back (I wonder if he'll regret that promise in six months).
>I'm curious, would it have bothered you as much if he'd just said: "I'm sick of this blog and I'm quitting it?" because that's basically what he did, except he promised to come back (I wonder if he'll regret that promise in six months).
Yes, this is exactly how he should have phrased it. "Burnt out" is a very strong term that refers to a state of extreme mental anguish induced by an unreasonable and inescapable level of overwork. It feels insulting and sneeringly privileged coming from someone whose job is to surf the internet for a few hours a day and sometimes post about it.
It is as if someone unironically described themselves as "severely clinically depressed" after their favorite sports team lost a game, or someone in the top 1% sincerely calling themselves "impoverished" after a slight cut to their yearly bonus (or the recent bloodbath in the stock market).
If the blog poster expected to be happy, or to have riches for example, and neither occurred at the level they expect (especially now 24 years in) burn out occurs.
I don't know anything about Jason, so I can't make an informed call on whether I think he is overly exaggerating things by using the term.
I do think there is at least a version of "burnt out" that just means you are really tired, because you have put a lot of effort into something for a long period of time, to the point that you are questioning whether it is worth it to you to continue doing it.
However, yeah, some people probably say "I'm so burnt out on 'X'" because they've spent over a half hour on it, and it still isn't done. That doesn't qualify, in my opinion.
If that's the crux of your objection, we can put this to bed. From Wikipedia:
> According to the World Health Organization (WHO), occupational burnout is a syndrome resulting from chronic work-related stress, with symptoms characterized by "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy".
So, it's the amount of stress over time, not amount of work per day. He says he's sick of following the news every day to write about it on his blog. I can see how reading the news every day, even when you don't want to, can be stressful. Even if I didn't, the point is that he does.
On the same note suicidal or depressed people can similarly be called privileged, spoiled, or what have you, but that would seriously be tone-deaf.