Calling Or Career?

A quote from my old friend Michael Lewis:

A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it -- often to the detriment of your life outside of it.

Ben Casnocha expands upon the thought.

The Dish is, of course, a calling, not a job. I did it for years for nothing. But in the end, life matters. Which is as good a way of saying that, as we approach our tenth anniversary, Patrick, Chris and I are going to start taking weekends off. I know this sounds completely crazy, and it has nothing whatever to do with the amazing weekend of summer weather we have coming up, but if we are not to burn ourselves out completely (there are just three of us catering to a million of you a month), we need to take some time to get our lives back in balance with the Dish's siren call.

I'm sure I'll break down at some point and blog on Saturday or Sunday, but I'm going to try not to. We may miss a couple of stories, but we already miss our lives. Living online can be destructive to things that make humans happy - and I'd like to have more time with friends, beagles, books, movies, Aaron. With any luck, observing the Sabbath may even help us produce better work in the weekdays.

Thanks for understanding. The next post will be the weekly wrap, a new feature rounding out the week's highlights. There's plenty for digestion over the weekend. I'll miss the spiritual and philosophical focus of Dish Sundays, but we hope to integrate that into the week.

Anyway, have a happy Easter.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan