On Sunday, while speaking to veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield, Sullivan said that the ‘crushing’ workload was only part of what made his job so overwhelming. The experience, Sullivan said, was often dehumanizing.
‘Here’s what I would say: I spent a decade of my life, spending around seven hours a day in intimate conversation with around 70,000 to 100,000 people every day, ’ Sullivan said. ‘And inevitably, for those seven hours or more, I was not spending time with any actual human being, with a face and a body and a mind and a soul.’
Sullivan said the job resulted in lost friendships and minimal contact with his family.
Ask Me Another. And Then Another.
March 30
It’s always a good sign, he lies, when your week starts with a bout of early morning insomnia. I woke up around 4:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep, so ended up reading British news reports about the election over there. I’m not quite sure when I became a politics wonk — I wasn’t like this about politics while I lived in the UK, although I took an interest. Part of me wonders if it’s something I’ve become fascinated by because I have easier access to the information now, thanks to the Internet and everyone having opinions/ideas that it’s so easy to scan through and feel well informed, even though the very opposite might be the case.
Occasionally, I wonder whether the Internet has made it easier to fake interest and knowledge in subjects, instead of actually making it easier to be educated/educate. Sure, there’s enough information out there to actually be able to learn things for real, but it’s far easier to… kind of learn things, and then let that information flow out of your mind minutes after you’re finished with it. (Spoilers: I might be describing my working practices.) As a result, I feel both more interested and aware in the world around me, and yet perpetually worried that I know less about anything and everything than I did years ago, when I actually had to work at things.
March 29
In the end, I was at the convention long enough; that’s not true in the sense that I didn’t get to see everyone that I’d hoped to run into, but is true in the sense of my being ready to leave when I did. Unless I’m working a show, there’s a weird limit to how long I can be there without thinking, yup, I’m done. I can’t explain it, but I was fascinated to talk to another comics journalist yesterday and have him say the essentially the same thing: that if he wasn’t working, he would only stick around for a handful of hours to say hello to friends and then bail. The bloom is off the rose, it seems.
March 28
I’m on a bus with dodgy wifi, en route to Seattle for Emerald City Comicon. I used to spend a lot of time on buses when I was younger, taking 4+ hour rides between home and college and dreading it, always. Either it’s age or an increasing love of not doing anything but reading, but this journey by contrast has been almost pleasant, and entirely relaxing — a good sign, considering it’s almost guaranteed that the show itself will be anything but.