Blogging: A deadly profession

Russell Shaw turned his own home into a 21st-century sweatshop. A prominent technology blogger, Shaw lived his job, filing posts from home around the clock, knowing that the size of his audience and his livelihood depended on a prolific outpouring of news and opinion about new products. Recently, Shaw, 60, realized he was exhausted and finally took a day off. “Have come down with something,” he said in an e-mail to his editor. “Resting now, posts to resume today or tomorrow.” He then dropped dead of a massive heart attack. Call it “death by blogging,” said Matt Richtel in The New York Times. In the past few months, three bloggers have suffered coronaries, two fatal. The sobering news has caused a wave of self-examination in the community of thousands of professional bloggers, who work up to 20 hours a day, frantically providing “content” for their websites. Fueled by protein supplements stirred into endless cups of coffee, they pride themselves on thriving under the stress of their cutting-edge jobs. With the recent deaths, however, “some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong.”

It sure has, said Travis Hudson in PCworld.com. People think my life as a blogger is easy because I get to work from home. But “working from home lets you work all day and all night.” When you’re paid a few cents per click or $10 per post, it’s hard to justify turning off the laptop just because the clock strikes midnight. If you think writing all day and all night is bad for your body, said Andrew Sullivan in Theatlantic.com, imagine what it does to your soul. The constant back and forth with readers is utterly addictive. But do it for too long and you forget what it’s like to be alone with your thoughts. You forget that not every sentence in the newspaper needs to be a trigger for an argument. “To rarely have a thought unexpressed, an observation not noted” is a strange, and unhealthy, thing.

Oh, boo-hoo, said Jeff Bercovici in Portfolio.com. Three out-of-shape middle-aged men get heart attacks and all of a sudden blogging is more dangerous than fighting fires and more stressful than working in an emergency room. It’s hardly news that “new technologies make it increasingly difficult to leave work at the office,” or that sitting behind a desk all day isn’t good for you. Bloggers who can’t handle it should consider doing something else. But first, a word of warning: On most jobs, you’re required to put on a pair of pants.

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