Quitting Youtube is a Meme: Motivation and Money, Fame and Failure.

you know i actually hate these videos
whenever people make youtube videos where like i'm quitting youtube i need to move on better passions and whatnot usually the reason is because they're not getting views anymore and their their channels dead and they just suck at making content what was probably even more naive was not understanding just how difficult it is to get you know famous on youtube i mean the concept of having you know 50 or 100 000 subscribers on youtube is just it's not an easy thing to do it's extremely difficult uh to get known on youtube if you're not already established now this is my official goodbye to youtube i can't live that life anymore i've been doing youtube for nine years i started when i was around 13. my youtube channel has always been my life expressed on onto this channel then i went to college and i made some college videos then i left school to pursue youtube 100 i loved that time like i was really you know live eat breathe youtube it was my whole heart my whole life my whole passion all i wanted to talk about all i wanted to do all i wanted to think about was youtube what could i create next and how could it be bigger and how could it be better yeah i mean you know for the most part it's just uh reminding yourself that you know you're you're on the right path i think a lot of people get depressed because they lose the idea of what they want to do and i feel like a lot of people are depressed because they don't know what they want to do you know it's like um you know a lot of people like for me like once i found out that i'm like okay i want to do youtube full time i want to be famous i you know like that kind of stuck in my head i was like okay we're doing this from now on we're not going back to a normal job uh we're gonna do youtube we're gonna do this online [ __ ] hardcore you know we're gonna put every we're gonna put all of our chips in one basket for this stuff and then eventually when we make enough money from this stuff then we'll branch out to investments and real estate and other businesses so when we have a big scandal or something we can uh [Music] [Music] [Applause] if you aren't in love with making videos and you're not in love with growing a youtube channel it's not your main thing and you're doing it for fun the fun really gets sucked out of it which makes making videos for me almost pointless because i'm doing it mostly for fun and i'm not allowed to make videos that i enjoy making or videos that i find fun if it's not fun there's no reason really to do it i know a lot of people probably don't want to hear this because you know they think of youtube as being you know a hobby enthusiast thing um but truthfully at my age i just can't put that much time into something that brings in so little money youtube is not the problem i am the problem i am the problem what first started as this passion and this love like this deep love of creating just turned into this treadmill and i started to despise it everyone in the comments would always just be against me and take their side it just started getting really annoying it just felt like everyone was all always automatically against me and just wanted to disagree with everything i was saying i hate them really to be honest all i can say is i really really hate most my audience because they're not nice i really do hate them and they kind of ruined youtube for me because i used to really enjoy making videos i used to enjoy opening myself up and being raw and genuine and honest and telling you guys about what i already think of about things and what i get for i just got a bunch of idiots in the comments section having a go at me nagging me calling me this and that and it just yeah i guess it it kind of got to me i didn't want youtube to be my passion anymore or my life i didn't want to be thinking about it all the time i wanted it to be a job i wanted it to be like a nine-to-five job where i go in i make my videos i come home i go to work act like i'm chloe couture and then i come home and i can be myself and i can be free but yeah it became really really hard to the point where every time i filmed a video it would feel like my soul was dying my soul was dying it just felt like a piece of me was dying every time one of the questions raised briefly in recent videos i made about left-wing politics was of how we live our lives with assumptions about the future in the case of our motivations for making youtube videos our motivations for coming on the internet sharing our lives on the internet there's no doubt that the assumption that fame is an inevitable outcome of these efforts you're making that sooner or later all of this will pay off that you yes you will become famous by sharing your life on youtube that distorts how we live our life at present in much the same way as the left-wing political views i was criticizing they condition people to think about future utopias future outcomes that are actually much less likely they're much more improbable than what we're talking about achieving here on youtube and in ways seen and unseen they change the way we feel about our lives they change the way we're living our lives here and now now this point about fame from my perspective it actually has direct implications for how we think about happiness also right imagine you knew someone who decided to have a kid and then they come to you and complain one day that they don't even see the point they're going to give the kid up for adoption because they just had a kid to make themselves happy and and they're not even happy it didn't work they didn't get the outcome it may sound ridiculous you probably will know a few people in your life who are only slightly less ridiculous than that or only slightly less honest and you might say this person wait a minute wait a minute you're telling me you had a kid just to be happy in a very meaningful sense that's crazy didn't someone tell you didn't you ever think through the extent to which having a kid might make you unhappy might make you miserable might make you you know really regret many things in your life think about the sacrifice think about the sorrow and the suffering and at best even if you contextualize that happiness wouldn't you see having a kid as being a mix of joy and sorrow you know labor and reward like the happiness is is one little piece of the mosaic but it's not the whole picture it's actually really fundamentally crazy to have a kid due to happiness i think it's also crazy to not have a kid because of happiness and it's crazy to give away your kid put your kid up for adoption to have someone else raise them because of that idea of happiness in a lot the same way a lot of them keep it fine in much the same way you know um to do what we're doing here on youtube um because of the presumption of fame as an outcome it's just plain crazy now i've got to tell you something the model i have advanced for why you and you and you should take the time to come on youtube has nothing to do with fame has nothing to do with money it has nothing to do with my unholy list of five terrible motivations that shaped the internet as we know it today what is it say say that with me now money fame power respect sex not necessarily in that order has nothing to do with any of those you know i think the way to think about youtube and the way to think about publishing on social media on the internet is to compare it to a conversation you have in a coffee shop okay i had a conversation with aaron janus the other day it was more than an hour long and at the end of it my girlfriend asked me was a lot of effort a lot of acne at the end of it my girlfriend asked me wow so did you record that i said no that was just a conversation with somebody i know you know that's it you know how it was much more effort to have that one conversation with someone who happens to be a youtuber than the average video maker and i know i mean i just understand the situation like my girlfriend just assumed because i was kind of putting all this effort out of this conversation and reaching out to this person and you know there's different kind of emotional elements to it like you know this this must be a youtube video this must be for an audience of whether it's 500 people or 5 000 people this must be for somebody other than it's like no no i did this just for this person who asked to talk to me and of course when you guys think about it unless you have absolutely no friends in this world most of you in the audience you probably do that all the time and you don't think of it as an extraordinary effort and maybe it is you know maybe it's actually worth pausing to reflect on your social life and how much energy and emotion and even creativity you put into your social life and evaluate that in terms of its outcomes but you know nobody is going to look at that and say oh i had a one hour conversation with a friend of mine today or a colleague or a friend of me or an outright enemy you had a one-hour conversation with somebody and now to evaluate it like well was that effort worth it you know for an audience of just one person right if you're uploading to youtube is it worth it for only 500 people is it worth it for only 50 000 people one of the guys that quoted this video he was complaining that he he just sees no point in making the effort to be emotionally honest on youtube if it's only for 30 000 people 30 000 people is just not enough you know to to justify you know that that effort that soul-searching that honesty but we all know if you're going to a coffee shop to meet a friend face-to-face the judgment you're making is that that one friend uh is worth it so from the first day i came on youtube you know that was the model i was playing by i had a long period of time of trying to use youtube to make friends to have colleagues to contribute to the future of the vegan movement as a political cause a long period of time trying to use youtube just to give a specific example to try to find talented hard-working people who could do the illustrations for a children's storybook i wanted to publish one example there were all kinds of talented people i was hoping to meet and and hoping to work with and the whole time i was surrounded by these misconceptions were addressing this video i was surrounded by people who thought that fame was easy on youtube god always remember that it was more than an hour long conversation with that guy he was a phd student in math and he just thought everything i was doing was wrong and his whole perspective was that getting up to hundreds of thousands and millions of views was something he could do dropping out if he was lecturing me about everything i was doing was wrong he had zero experience on youtube he gave up after three months that guy he lost uh he lost faith in his own surrounded by people who thought the fame and the money was easy or was guaranteed to them if they made these sacrifices if they if they made this effort and from my perspective uh i think that is just as crazy as believing that you can get famous by having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop no that never happens but it is so wildly improbable that you can't live in the present tense you can't live your life today um in the shadow of that idea about one possible idealized highly improbable future