When The Humble Libertarian was at the height of its activity in 2009 - 2011, I would occasionally surf the blogosphere and find myself in graveyards littered with dead blogs.
Not officially retired, everybody thanked for reading and supporting, reasons given for why the blog would no longer be active, and what not... just dead.
Fell off a cliff.
The most recent blog post would be 10 months old and about some specific topic or event and then just nothing else after that.
Just nothing.
If it was a somewhat popular blog there might be some speculation in the comments. Did the blogger "Go Galt?" and give up on all this?
Life is busy and blogging is time consuming. Maybe they just got to carried away by other things in their life, but why didn't they even leave us a note??
Because of DENIAL.
It starts off you miss a post because yes things are very busy.
But that's okay, you'll make it up. But you skipped that blog post and now you've lost your rhythm. You miss the next one.
Then what happens: you feel terrible and anxious about not keeping up with your blog. Now in addition to other stressors in your life, your blog, which you love to write has become a source of discomfort to you when you think about it.
That discomfort adds another reason not to update in addition to the ones that have already caused you to miss two updates.
There's a snowball effect, but you don't leave a note and say hey I'm taking a break, because you are NOT TAKING A BREAK, GOT SLAMIT you are going to update it tomorrow!!
But you don't. And now it's like the pressure's on for real. The stakes feel so high, and what kind of sickness is this that all you have to do is snap your fingers basically and break the spell by updating your damn blog, but you're frozen?
And now it's been half a month without an update but you can't admit that your blog is definitely on a hiatus. You WILL update it this week! Denial is a very powerful force of nature.
So you don't leave a note because you're going to update tomorrow, so why would you leave a note. And when it's finally two months without an update, the truth settles in, but it would be awkward now to leave a note. You feel embarrassed or something.
Besides it's hardly on your mind anymore, other than a little uncomfortable whisper that comes to you now and then and makes you cringe. You've changed in the last two months. You're not a blogger anymore. You're not the kind of person that updates their blog.
How many days do they say it takes to form a habit? Fourteen? Yeah, this is who you are now. Or who you are not. You're not a blogger anymore. You stopped feeding the fire.
And now your blog is a floating corpse frozen in an exact moment like one of those bodies on the way up to the peak of Mount Everest without so much as the courtesy of a vague and creepy hint like CROATOAN.
