Pressure makes diamonds, pressure bursts pipes. #Nihilism

vegan youtube if that's even a thing um it's like in decline so that's problematic now this nihilism runs deep and it conveys uh it conveys and betrays a certain contempt [Music] and you know after like over two years of the channel i just hit 300 so it's like you know which given my content was just kind of like oof and then youtube videos they they make yeah there's like so much effort you put into it and you get like barely anything out of it like activism wise or like people commenting and you're like great video you just i've i've done like youtube videos since i was 13 um pretty consistently and that's just the that's basically what happens i mostly just made videos because i wanted to make videos but uh and i wanted that to be be an escape from college and work and everything but that obviously didn't work i don't want to give up on my youtube channel but like vegan content on youtube is like really difficult um anyway as well as like youtube being extremely difficult so i just don't feel like i can do much activism-wise but yeah i just feel like you have to have a setup to record and react stop the stream and um it's just not gonna happen so it's like hard to put in the effort but i know i could like be similar to like vegan gays or david rams or something if i like put in a lot of effort but also when i get like a full-time job it's going to be really difficult because you just don't have the time for that or maybe i'm just neurodivergent or something so people like don't like to listen to me and i'm weird or something i don't really know what it is um but apparently our personality doesn't draw people in so sorry about that um but yet i'd like to make youtube videos about like honorable activism it's just kind of like awkward because what do i like how do you film it first of all when you're doing activism you need to have the camera person all of this just requires money and a lot of effort and then i don't know if there's any like if it really reaches anybody on youtube [Music] the year is 2022 and i just rearranged all the furniture in my living room so that i have space to use we fit for the nintendo wii now why why why why why yes in part it's because all of the gems have been shut down again after a period of two years in which your ability to exercise has been severely curtailed by government policies that have come and gone but sure in some small part no one would doubt that it's because my own youtube channel puts some pressure on me to be in shape to stay in shape and when you start creating content on social media you should really think analytically about what kind of pressure it is that you're putting yourself now right now i'm sitting in front of a bookshelf it's full of books i've never read and honestly in the next 12 months i'm very unlikely to find time to read even one of them how the red sun rose by gao hua i'd love to read this book i'm positively motivated to read this book and i believe this was a donation from a youtube viewer this is one of the books i didn't pay for myself but that someone generously bought for me with the understanding with the expectation that i would read it review it discuss it make youtube videos talking about the politics of china in relations book i feel pressure to get that reading done i feel pressure to create youtube videos that reflect the reading and research that's ongoing in my life and that pressure is a profoundly positive thing it can bring about transformation and change for the better for each and all of us but you've got to choose what kind of pressure you want the young woman i'm responding to here she's had some success on tick tock she's had some videos on tick tock that reached tens of thousands of viewers but she complained she gets an avalanche of hate mail and a lot of it is complaining that she's obese that she's overweight that she's out of shape that she's not attractive enough because what people are looking for on tick tock their expectation and they're somehow stumbling on her vegan activist videos what they're looking for are people in revealing attire dancing to short clips of music and to my knowledge based on what she included in her own youtube videos she also wears revealing attire and dances to music while inserting vegan propaganda slogans and so on so you know it's understandable from the audience's perspective what their expectations are and why they're sending her that kind of hate mail even if i can relate to the fact that she's going to find this demoralizing and discouraging and she's going to ask herself is that the kind of pressure she wants to have in her life now i have to think about this all the time this is the year 2022. this could be the year in which for the first time i study the spanish language spanish is a much easier language to learn if your first language is english then chinese then cambodian then hebrew then greek you know i've studied so many languages korean and i've experienced studying so many different languages i could make very rapid progress in studying the spanish language in the space of one year and i could come here on youtube and i could film myself studying it i could do six hour live streams where i'm studying spanish and then doing push-ups and then going back to my desk and studying spanish i could have uh alternation between uh workout videos and uh language practice videos and i could bring you guys all along for the ride you could all come along with the experience as i develop and as i improve and people in the audience who get to see how my accent changes with time but when you when you make that commitment you're putting pressure on yourself to day after day week after week month after month right deliver for your audience and you have to ask yourself to what extent are you delivering for yourself what to what he said do you really want to do this do you really want to change and become that different person because after just one year after just two years if i become a spanish language live streamer if i start watching and listening to the news in spanish right and i start talking about politics in spanish i'm gonna have to have english subtitles because my spanish should be so bad right that's gonna change who i am it's gonna change how i feel about myself that's gonna change how you guys feel about me too i mean in some ways learning a language and speaking language is incredibly shallow and yet this is something tangible you can understand already how that's going to utterly profoundly change who you are spanish isn't the only temptation in my life this way i have a trip coming up to thailand i could throw myself back into the study of the thai language i could throw myself back into the study of the lotion language or speaking a garbled mix of thai and lotion you know i could throw myself back into southeast asian languages languages i have a history with i have a background with and i could come here on youtube and i could film myself speaking and practicing those languages and i could start reading the newspaper because even if it's in english i could start reading the newspaper from thailand from laos from cambodia and caring more about those politics and talking about those things and you guys could come along with me for the right and i would feel that pressure i would take onto my shoulders your expectations and frankly even if none of you are interested i mean how many people in my audience speak spanish there are a few how many of you are interested in any way in tai losh and cambodia or any of those or the news or politics of the particle there are very few but in a sense right the pressure doesn't come from the particular actual people in the audience the pressure is coming from an idea i have of who you ought to be like it's an idealized audience it's an imaginary business and the pressure comes from an idea of who i ought to be of what i ought to live up to if i'm starting to stream content whether that is content reading and discussing books you know hashtag booktube doing book reviews you know doing research time with that whether that's content learning and practicing languages or whether that's me hitting the gym ten thousand times harder now i'm not that interested in becoming a fitness youtuber but there are aspects of fitness that interest me there are workout challenges that interest me again and again i see footage of police officers in terrible physical condition i see cops and i don't think they can do 10 push-ups i've been tempted to do a series of youtube videos in which i work out really hard at the gym and i show you the different standards for police fitness so they're different from city to city jurisdiction to jurisdiction but generally everywhere in the western world there are requirements you have to be able to do so many push-ups in so many minutes so many jumping jacks um sometimes you run up and down a small staircase you jump over there there are very specific tests you can look this up for police fitness i would be interested in doing the exercises myself and showing them to you in a video and then in trying to interview somebody maybe i just look around and use quotations from interviews that are existing and look into how is it possible that so many police officers look like they're you know two heart attacks away from a hospital gurney how is it possible that so many cops are in act on active duty and active service look how are they passing these tests and what do these tests exist for and what what does physical fitness mean in the realm of law enforcement and and look taking a step beyond that i mean you can see i'm i'm sincerely interested in this what percentage of our cops smoke cigarettes what percentage of our cops drink alcohol what percentage of our cops are taking psychiatric medicines such as antidepressants anxiety medications so like if you include the brain in terms of physical health these people who rule over us these people who have the power of life and death over us what if we took seriously the question of their physical health including uh frankly their intellectual health as being of one nature uh with the whole body that interests me and i can really imagine doing a whole series of videos that showed much more of me doing 200 push-ups a day and now think about the pressure i'm choosing to put on myself and think about how hard it is to keep that year 2020 to 2022 when i haven't even been able to to exercise at a gym um people make the mistake the terrible crippling long-term mistake of assuming that the purpose of youtube is to get famous you know you don't get to choose whether people love you or hate you you don't get to choose to what extent you are going to be appreciated to what extent you are going to be understood you get to choose what kind of person you are you get to choose what kind of person you want to be and if you think of yourself as a creative artist if you think of these things as a creative challenge all you get to control is your art form but the ultimate outcome of that art it's not a portrait it's not a painting it's not a sculpture right the clay that's in your hands is the image of the person you yourself can become you're sculpting an image of the man or a woman that you want to be you're making the shoes if you like that you now have to walk a mile so as miserable as my play might seem and having this stack of books and this is not the only way to get the reading done and present some kind of intelligent and erudite analysis and discussion for you people think about with the passage of just two years what kind of person you might become if you took on that kind of challenge if you accepted that kind of pressure of your life instead of competing for attention with other scantily clad women or other scantily clad men dancing to short excerpts of pop music on tick tock now this nihilism runs deep and it conveys uh it conveys and betrays a certain contempt [Music]