Reading Andrew Sullivan’s “A note to my readers” this week was like an out-of-body experience, as if I could have been reading my own words.

“I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future,” he wrote.

Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

Like Sullivan, I’ve been blogging here daily for 15 years, and I have sometimes ached with a desire to pour myself into some longer investigations and a different form of writing, if only for a while. His words could have flowed from my keyboard, for sure. But unlike Sullivan, I haven’t attracted 30,000 subscribers or built a surprisingly robust business with a million dollars in annual revenue.

No, I’m not quitting, although I won’t deny having played out that scenario in my mind from time to time.

It’s instructive to see how others have responded to his announcement (see “A Blogger Breaks Free: Your Thoughts“; “A Blogger Breaks Free: Your Thoughts II“; and “A Blogger Breaks Free: Blog Reax“).