Giving Up Political Commentary For Lent, An Update

As you may recall, I gave up day to day political commentary for Lent. If you’re curious, here’s how it’s going: pretty damn well.

I’ll admit, it was hard at first. But now that I’m in week five, I’ve noticed that getting out of the day to day political slog-fests has been rather liberating. It’s pared down my daily RSS reading, that’s for sure. And the new feeds I’ve added to support my other blogging gigs in the fields of technology, science, religion and philosophy have opened up whole new areas of the web I haven’t spent much time in, and I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

It’s been a breath of fresh air and honestly, I think I might do this every year.

But when I do come back here to talk about politics, one thing the past few weeks have taught me is to avoid the day-to-day grind of back and forth sniping and focusing on whatever the gods of Memeorandum have dictated to be the topic of the day. It’s just not rewarding. It makes me irritiable and onery. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll focus on when I get back to it, but it will be different.

The past few weeks have been illuminating, to say the least.

FILED UNDER: Blogosphere, Political Theory, Religion, Science & Technology, ,
Alex Knapp
About Alex Knapp
Alex Knapp is Associate Editor at Forbes for science and games. He was a longtime blogger elsewhere before joining the OTB team in June 2005 and contributed some 700 posts through January 2013. Follow him on Twitter @TheAlexKnapp.

Comments

  1. Murray says:

    As a former “daily politics” addict I hear you loud and clear. There is something extremely debilitating in the 24/7 talking points grind where real policy debate is drowned in pointless fake debates basically repeating the same arguments over and over again.

    That been said, I do hope you still intend resuming your Levin blogging. He really deserves being mocked.

  2. John Malkovich says:

    “It’s been a breath of fresh air and honestly, I think I might do this every year.”

    You should have Mataconis try this.

    Maybe he’ll lose his obsession with Sara Palin

  3. tom p says:

    I didn’t give up any thing for Lent… but at this time of year it is hard to keep me out of my garden… nurturing green things, watching flowers blossom, working the soil and running it thru my fingers… these are things that have been happening for thousands of years.

    They give me peace…. all else too, will pass.