So I haven’t posted a tweet in nine months. How am I doing? I’m still in recovery. Over the previous 10 years, I had written 180,000 tweets. Yes, I said 180,000. That’s 18,000 a year, 1,500 a month.

I was putting out an average of 50 tweets a day — while holding down a full-time job editing a magazine, with two firm writing deadlines every week, and raising three children with a wife who works full-time.

How was that even possible? Well, I’ve always written fast. And for much of my life, I’ve felt like a frustrated would-be stand-up comic. A tweet is basically a one-liner, so if you’re a compulsive quipster who never quite got up the nerve to stand in front of a brick wall doing bits, it’s the outlet you always dreamed of. Twitter worked well for me in many ways. Over the course of this decade, my follower count rose from near zero to 141,000 people. The tweets helped garner audience for my writing and for articles in Commentary, the magazine I edit.