A Substack Sabbatical

Four years later, time to take a break! 4️⃣

A chameleon, by Ustad Mansur (1612). One of my favorite paintings of all time

The concept of a sabbatical year has a long history. It apparently descends from shmita, the Jewish practice of forbidding all agricultural activity for one year out of seven, as described in a couple of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Just like God told men to rest on the seventh day of the week, the sabbath, so he has told them to let the land rest every seventh year. One can only speculate as to whether this was an optimal culturally evolved adaptation, to let the soil lie fallow until it becomes fertile again.

In the late 19th century, universities, apparently starting with Harvard, took the phrase and applied it to people. An academic could go on sabbatical leave to be discharged of his teaching obligations, rest, think, and travel to meet other researchers and update himself in his field. The practice continues to this day, with the expectation that a sabbatical year increases a scholar’s research output. It makes sense: research is creative, and creative work benefit a lot from the freedom of unstructured time. The metaphor of the mind as land, which should lie fallow every now and then in order to replenish it, is an apt one.

Today sabbatical years are taken for all sorts of reasons by people in all sorts of situations, both officially and not, both paid and unpaid. Some use them to go for a year-long trip around the world. Others to write and publish a book. Yet others to bask in the glorious potentiality of being “funemployed,” and perhaps let new opportunities come to them in order to redirect their career to what’s most important.

Usually, though we speak of sabbaticals relative to our main line of work, rather than our hobbies or passions.

But it makes sense for those as well, right? Sometimes you really do need to let the land lie fallow for a while. Sometimes it turns out that pumping out blog posts every week, consistently, for four years, while being employed full-time and having other activities like singing in a choir and being on two nonprofit boards, is a little much. You need some kind of creative reset. You need to take a sabbatical from your Substack.

Today is my 210th weekly post, and my four-year blog anniversary — I published my first article on November 18, 2020. It is also the first time that I commit to not writing every week. For the rest of 2024, at least, I won’t hold myself to any publishing schedule or standard. I may publish something anyway, if I feel like it. Or not!

Come 2025, well, we’ll see. I’m thinking of not having a schedule anymore, or maybe a low-frequency one like once a month or something. Hopefully I still manage to write often enough to satisfy myself and reap the benefits (clearer thinking, validation from getting new subscribers, etc.). With any luck, I’ll manage to reach another of my goals, which is to be more satisfied with each piece I publish. The weekly schedule has meant a lot of essays I was only, like, 80% happy with. This was always the goal — to allow myself to experiment, to not worry about quality too much — but now I feel stuck in the awkward position of having just not quite enough time to reach the quality threshold I would like for my work. If I publish fewer essays, but ones I’m happier to share around, then that will be a win. It may also mean faster growth, since an excellent blog post has much more potential to find a life of its own in the vast corridors of the internet. (And publishing every week is probably a bit much; I think I prefer to subscribe to writers who publish less frequently myself.)

(Also that will allow me to stop cheating by republishing my Classical Futurist essays or writing quick but not so interesting pieces about writing like this one 😁)

Meanwhile, let this be the time for rekindled creativity! There are so many projects I would like to work on but haven’t found the energy for. In fact, just the anticipation of this sabbatical has given me new ideas to work on, and I’m excited to free up some mental space to develop and implement them. (Keep your eyes peeled for an update to my old tech tree project!)

This is also the right time to shake up this blog and let it be reborn in a slightly different way. You may have noticed the name change. After much hesitation before and after publishing that post a few weeks ago, I decided that I did like ‘Hopeful Monsters’ enough to make it the new title. I also bought a domain name and will update that sometime soon. It will nicely mark the transition to this coming new era.

Alright, that’s it for me. Let’s go have my creativity replenished. I’ll see you on the other side of this sabbatical!

"Great Hornbill" folio from the Shah Jahan Album, by Ustad Mansur (circa 1615–20)