I can sum up most of my reasons for the career switch fairly quickly. I now make more money, have shorter hours, and get longer holidays. And I was getting fed up with the Spartan mentality at [insert name of journalism organization here], where increasingly over the past few years the professional competence of me and my colleagues seemed to be measured in how much blood, sweat, toil, and tears we shed, regardless of whether the shedding was called for and despite considerable evidence that it was counter-productive.

One final reason would take longer than I've got right now to go into in any detail, but as a quick gloss, I have also over the past few years begun to feel that journalism as a profession was turning into something I was no longer much interested in. Psychoanalytically minded historians or historically oriented shrinks could spend years in an excruciatingly dull debate over whether it was me or the craft of journalism that had changed the most, but that seems to me like debating whether the guy on the dessert island died of malnutrition or dehydration. The guy's dead either way, right?

I could cite a whole host of things as either causes, effects, or some of each -- the growing dominance of the Internet as the first deliverer of news, the economically dispiriting outlook for newspapers, the pandering after celebrities and the search for the latest sleaze in most magazines, the astonishing stupidity of virtually all television. But the upshot as far as I was concerned was pretty simple. I used to read The New Yorker and the New York Times and Time and any number of other publications, and in any given issue, I'd see something and say, hey, I'd like to have done that. Written the story, helped conceive of it and edited it, whatever -- I would just like to have been part of putting it in front of people. That seldom happens any more. I see stuff that holds my interest well enough on the Tube or on a plane or in the toilet, but if it's time to get up before I finish reading it, well, that's okay, too.

You can see where that kind of thinking leads. If I wasn't interested in most of the journalism now being produced, how could I stay interested in producing it? When I thought about that, I realized I wasn't much interested in what I was doing any more, and from that concluded it was time to look for something else.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me -- I didn't leave the party, it left me. But you mentioned in your earlier message that you feel teaching is going to the dogs, too. A friend of mine from college just retired from teaching, as soon as her pension kicked in after 25 years, and she says more or less the same thing. It's no longer the kind of job that she loved when she first started. Since you still are a teacher, presumably you don't want to say anything too scathing in your column, but if you've got a moment to drop me a line sometime, I'd be interested in seeing your thinking on the subject. Journalism and teaching are both in the general business of delivering information or knowledge, and I have a vague, inchoate feeling that what's happening to each is related to how people are getting more and more information but know less and less what to do with it.