Thank you, I’m feeling fine. Why do you ask? -- Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Thank you, I’m feeling fine. Why do you ask?

April 07th, 2008

Some fresh air & sunshine, perhaps?

The blogosphere has been aflutter, in a minor way, over this New York Times story:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

The gist: some bloggers work themselves sick, or even 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.

My overall reaction: try laying pipe in a hot Texas summer, why don’t you? Or maybe you’d like a turn as a pit trader in Chicago? Oil-rig firefighter? Maybe a long E.R. residency someplace?

In other words, ehh. The deaths of Shaw and Orchant are sad and untimely, but they draw so much attention because the blogosphere is a hothouse. The reality is that many, many Americans work unhealthy hours and deal with unhealthy stress. And many of them do it, essentially, by choice.

The Times story acknowledges this, in a paragraph that undercuts the premise of the story’s headline and opening grafs:

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The story does give an interesting view into the lives of nonstop tech bloggers, which is an interesting slice of life, but it errs in framing ballistic blogging as somehow different from other stress-laden careers. I can tell you from experience that this gig is a heck of a lot easier than manual labor or frontline customer service.

These are the funniest takes I’ve seen on the story: