Mark Pilgrim is going to unplug for awhile.

Sounds like he's been going through the same woods I trudged through recently, or at least some paths in the same thorny forest. But, it sounds like he's gotten himself even more inextricably bound up in ties to work then me - so much so that he really needs to unplug even from personal net presence to escape. Not just to avoid falling to some abstract sheep-farming burn out, but to avoid the immediate reach of The Client.

So, not that I want to assume to much about you and me, but I think many of us are passionate about the things we're lucky enough to get paid to do - so much so that many of us do work-like things for play. And oftimes, actual work spills into play/personal time. Sometimes it's heroism, sometimes it starts as fun, but eventually, as Mark also recently observed, there remains no demarcation. No amount of human passion or personal love for work can survive when the demands of work inevitably grow to consume all available bandwidth. And y'know, no amount of human sanity can stand for long when one's capacity for effort is described as 'bandwidth'.

Bah. So how do you strike the balance, and where do you dig in? How many do you take for the team, and how many times do you shrug it off at five? The one thing that I saw as positive in the crash of the dot-com age was an anticipation of life-at-net-speed slowing down to something a bit more human, no longer powered by insane sums of money and crack-monkeys of hype. Are we getting there yet?

Good luck, Mark. I recommend trips to the zoo, and close observation of cats.

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