Blogging and Work-Life Balance in a Digital World

A recent NY Times article is (predictably) getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere.  The article uses the deaths of two bloggers (and a heart attack suffered by a third) to wonder aloud whether blogging as a profession carries inherent stress that causes folks to blog themselves to death:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

John Batelle wonders what the fuss is about: after all, in any profession there will be those who unfortunately work themselves to the brink of personal collapse.  Just because blogging is a relatively new profession doesn’t mean that we should be any more shocked than we are are by, say, a lawyer who works him or herself to death.  But in a comment on Batelle’s post,  reader JG offers a  great and thoughtful response (I encourage you to read the whole thing; emphasis mine):

Even people who work themselves to death in their offices, late into the night, eating bad take-out, had [sic] to leave their offices at some point. In order to go home, they have to walk outside, catch some fresh air, walk up or down a couple of stairs to get to the subway. That travel period gives them a modicum of real contact with real people. A nod. Maybe sometimes even a smile. An eye-flick of recognition from the newspaper vendor on the corner. Those small things are sustaining, life-affirming, human. And those things, no matter how small, do help reduce stress.

The internet changes that. Again, this is what we have to admit to ourselves that we believe. The internet makes things different. Yes, we’d like all of it to be different-better. But sometimes it is different-worse. And one way it could very well be different-worse is that blogging for a living, from home, means you lose all those little moments of human contact, of a little bit of exercise, of a little bit of fresh air.

I’ve been thinking about quality of life a lot as I wrap up my first year of working full time.  I’m also continually thinking about career choices (I’m not the only one on this blog), particularly through the lens of quality of life.  When I reflected on the suburbs and commuting life, I mentioned working from home and tele- or cyber-commuting.  The discussion above adds another (helpful) layer of complexity to that notion, and it certainly applies to careers other than blogging.  In any career, the same changes that allow us to work from home make it harder and harder to not work from home.  And while blurring that line between office and life can be a wonderful thing–when, for instance a parent can coach a little league baseball game and finish work from home afterwards–it exerts a powerful and sometimes damaging force on ambitious individuals who love their careers.

Work-life balance will be an even greater challenge as my (or our) generation proceeds down any number of career paths.  Whereas people have worked themselves to physical or mental breakdown for years, we now often face (relatively new) expectations to be available by cell at all times, to check emails away from the office, and to work from home (connected to coworkers and office resources via the web) in our “free time.”

By the way, if you’re a blogger and you’re now fearing for your life, here are tips on how to be a healthy blogger.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Cemetery Belle.