Kottke, on Sabbatical

Jason Kottke, six weeks ago:

Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In
my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used
to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end
and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get
from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media
healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy?
What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere
else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other
blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions
while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I
need time away to gain perspective.

So. The plan, as it currently stands, is to take 5-6 months away
from the site. I will not be posting anything new here. I won’t be
publishing the newsletter. There won’t be a guest editor either — if someone else was publishing here, it would still be on my mind
and I’m looking for total awayness here.

Six weeks in and I miss his words dearly, but I’m happy for him. They say you should hydrate before you get thirsty. I suspect the same is true for taking sabbaticals — you should take one before you know you need one. That’s hard to figure out, though.

A friend once asked me what’s been the longest stretch between posts on DF since I started. I told him the truth: I don’t know.

Update: Well, now I know, thanks to a nifty Ruby script from DF reader Henrik Nyh. I took a 12-day break around Christmas in 2003. Since I started the Linked List (shorter link posts) in 2004, the longest gap is 8 days, from 29 December 2019 to 6 January 2020. The longest stretch between feature articles is 50 days, from 22 September to 11 November 2015.