I've been taking a break from philosophy for two years, although I haven't kept to it strictly. It was a promise I made to myself, where I could relax my own demands, but making the promise still made a difference.
It's hard to draw a line between what is and isn't philosophy (maybe all writing that tries to make a point is somewhat philosophical). It's more of a case of knowing it when you see it. While probably some kind of strict, public vow of abstinence to philosophy could be enforced, the costs of defining and enforcing it seem somewhat burdensome to me. But making a vow to myself, while probably sacrificing some rigor, is inexpensive to implement. The vow you actually try to keep is more effective than the stronger one you don't.
In the last two years, I have done the following things:
released a fiction book I had already written, recorded demos of an
album, composed and improvised instrumental music, wrote three albums
(one released), reviewed my blog, wrote some booklets, set up an
Internet radio station, and thought about the relationship between
my writing and other people's writing. (Also dealt with personal
issues and a crashed computer and backing things up.)
Abstaining from philosophy at first was a welcome break (I think, since I was tired of it when I took it). But after a while, I had recovered from it somewhat and without the vow would have gone back to it. I did break the vow a few times, I guess when there was something important for me to work on, but substantially have kept it. When a book got too philosophical, I set it aside (this happened more than once). One effect of this turning aside is that I looked for other things to read.
I tried practicing Lent a few years ago. I think that Lent is too short for me. 40 days is approximately a month and a half. Two years is 24 months. 24 divided by 1.5 is 16, so I experienced 16 consecutive Lents with this break. That was long enough to really get into it. I feel sometimes like things don't fully arrive before they go away.
The last few months of the break were difficult, a kind of desert experience. I found myself making myself put off decisions until I saw how things would be when I got back into philosophy. Work can be a kind of self-punishment, or it can be like bread, and I find it's mostly the latter for me.
Now my break is over and I've been thinking about what to do next. In July, I started a new blog, called Following. It's a blog about "things following" (philosophy) and "people following things" (religion).
Since the fall of 2023, I've been trying to only post posts to this blog that are really necessary, trying to minimize change. From 2019 to 2023 I was writing in a "bleeding edge, maximalist" way, like a testing branch of a Linux distribution (or, somewhat, like regular Ubuntu). But since, I was trying a "conservative, minimalist" approach, like point releases to a distribution one would use for a server (like Debian). I've decided as of now to become even more conservative, to get close to the point where the blog is done, perhaps ready to be made into an ebook version.
So to a large extent, this blog is done. It is more or less fixed in content, more of an object than a process. The period of my life it is about is over, so the thing that it was documenting is now complete, and it can be looked at as a completed thing. The basic project that I've been working on is not over. Something new may supersede the content of much of this blog someday, but for now it's the best representation of my intellectual project.
