How Not to Quit YouTube

Last year I wrote about content creator burn-out, which was a deeply introspective piece about my own journey with making videos for my YouTube channel. And in what is perhaps an interesting coincidence, over the past several months some very high profile channels have announced their closure. Perhaps my thoughts were just echoing an overarching cultural malaise that myself and millions of others were simultaneously experiencing. Or maybe my hobbyist experience has nothing in common with the experience of those living the life of a career YouTuber pressed under the weight of turning videos into food on the table.

But my expression on the topic tapered off into a somewhat dour, depressed tone. That's no longer how I feel now.

Burn-out vs The YouTube Content Creator

When I started this blog, I had a lot of problems in my life and writing about my hobbies gave me something of an outlet. It may not have addressed my core issues, but it gave me a needed distraction and some relief from the depression and anxiety those issues brought. It was also an exercise, as I enjoyed writing and I saw it as a way to hone my skill, albeit in a vacuum largely devoid of feedback. But I am my own worst critic, and so in obsessing over the things I had written, I was generating my own feedback loop. If nothing else, I could grow my skill at expressing the feelings I was trying to convey.

When one of my hobbies turned into a YouTube channel, that became all I could do. I didn't have the time or the energy to devote to blog posts, and any other hobbies that didn't involve just simple collecting tended to go by the wayside. Without even the remotest idea of what I was doing, I naïvely set out to develop and conquer a new skill: Video production.

I love Amazon Prime

You know there's a lot more confessing my love of things and a lot less bitching than I expected to do in this blog, but oh well, appreciating things sometimes is good for the soul. It's been ten days since my last post, and I have to write about something.

The internet is a curse and a blessing

I've been tempted lately to write something not related to technology, but instead more personal, which is something I promised myself I'd never do on a blog-like site. Since I've never really explained my reasoning here, I'll briefly say that it stems from the public nature of blogs and the private nature of things that happen in your personal life, and the inappropriate mixing of the two for what I can only imagine are questionable motives. Journals and diaries were always meant to be private, and if you have to do any sort of suppressing of your thoughts and feelings because you're mindful of prying eyes, you're not dealing with those issues. But I digress as this isn't a problem with the internet I wish to address today.

The problem I wish to address relates more to the speedy nature of the internet, and the endless fountain of information accessible through it. The internet is like the fast food restaurant chains and the introduction of the automobile before it: it allows us to get what we seek faster than ever before. I was watching TCM this evening and it had a short segment on the introduction of cars, then began to play the Orson Welles flick The Magnificent Ambersons. In both the short and the beginning of the movie, they address the growing pace of life, and how, seemingly miraculously, people seemed to have time to do just about anything in the old days despite having a slower time getting to them. Picnicks, visiting, tea parties, and my mind immediately started to add things: reading, writing, exercising....living. Things I have more of a problem with personally, so the nature of this post is very irregular for this blog, but I find the need to talk about the negative effects the internet has had in taking up my free time and leaving me with pretty much nothing with which to do things I keep putting off, rather than just taking the time to finally do them.

A new home

Long ago, there was a page of the utmost simplicity in which I formed on the premise that I could say whatever I wanted and didn't care to hoot who saw it. It was a webpage, I adored it, and it adored me. We lived happily together for probably over a year. It was simple, not because I'm simple, but because my skills at the coding of HTML were of such limited breadth that I could not strain for complexity out of the necessity of keeping things enjoyable for myself. I made articles for it, resembling blog posts, but with such overdrawn length and crude language that I preferred to call them ramblings. I generally confined my topics to those relating to the tech industry. I lamented blogs for their personal nature, and the idea of publishing such personal insights to the view of the public with the purpose of having others read them. I was content with the way things were, and updated quite infrequently at the pace of leisurely detachment. Then, all at once that page was gone. Attempts to unearth any remnants from Google's colossal archive of cached webpages proved fruitless. There was no hope of it coming back. My host had booted me out, and though it was free, I cursed at thee, and mourned the passing of my private little nook on the internet that I had all to myself.

Now, I find my fingers aching for the keys again, and a platform to launch the fruits of their rhythmic typing which is as clean and private as my old webpage was. At first, I turned to the network that fuels much of my wasted time on the internet, IGN. They have a blogging system, but it's of such a simple and cluttered nature as to be rendered woefully unappealing. So now I turn to this one. The most popular blog site there is. It is here I will dump all forthcoming run-on sentences, cheesy adjective-chaining, and overall brutishly executed grammatical stylings that I can squeeze from the lowest bowels of my intellect. I am now, in fact, the biggest fucking hypocrit I could ever be.