Blogging Causes Death: Like Life

What a ridiculous postulation, that blogging can “cause” death. The New York Times must have nothing better to investigate.

It is terrible that Mark Orchand and Russell Shaw have died young. And that Om had a heart attack.
But these are hardly due to blogging, as Om would admit.

However, it is worthwhile realizing that America over the past two decades has become a place where people can hardly make a living while having a life. My foster son and his fiancee both work and go to college, and must live with me. Most families in American are two-earner families. And stress is endemic in our population, typiified by the amount of sleep we get — five to six hours a night, which is two less than we need.

I think we’ve lost the sense of what life is all about. It’s not about 24-hour news cycles, or hedge funds, or houses.

I remember a time a decade or two in Japan, at the height of the Japan, Inc. economy, when “company men” were reguarly keeling over dead in their forties from stress. I haven’t heard about that since the Japanese economy collapsed, which presumably liberated many of those men from their jobs and thus saved their lives.

It’s about stress, folks, not about one profession or another. It’s about attachment to outcomes, which as Buddha pointed out, is what causes suffering.