A long-term content creator is stepping away from their consistent weekly video format after a decade of dedicated output, not due to burnout in the traditional sense, but to reclaim a life outside of work and pursue more experimental projects.
Mind Map
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This isn’t the standard YouTuber burnout-apology video.
And it’s not “oh, woe is me, I’m leaving forever”.
I’m going somewhere with this.
Literally.
I’ve been throwing stuff at the internet since 1999.
And for many, many years, that stuff went almost nowhere.
I had occasional bits of success,
but could never make any of them last long-term.
I remember thinking, so many times during all those years…
will any of this stuff I’m making ever work?
Well, this did.
I didn’t know that, back when I was filming
the first videos for the series that was then called
Things You Might Not Know,
I just held out my phone at arm’s length
and talked into it for 90 seconds with almost no research!
I really don’t like those videos now.
But the first of them was published
exactly ten years before this one.
To the minute. 4pm, January 1st, 2014.
For the first month of that format,
I was publishing a video almost every day,
and then I settled down: one video a week.
Mostly on location, near windswept infrastructure,
although there’s computer science and linguistics in there too,
and occasional green-screen animated videos.
I experimented with other formats on other days,
but the rule I set myself was:
Monday, 4pm, something interesting.
I never got to space.
I never got to the ocean depths.
And I never got to fly harnessed underneath a helicopter,
I couldn’t find an excuse to do that one.
But I never missed a week.
There’s been a few guest videos, of course,
and occasionally some blatant filler.
One time I just uploaded two and a half hours of
unedited footage of garlic bread flying to the edge of space,
and that turned into one of the most viewed videos I’ve ever had.
Sometimes a video would be a day or two early or late
for one reason or another. But to my own satisfaction,
which is ultimately the only thing that I’m counting,
there’s been a video a week for ten years.
I never broke the streak.
I don’t know when I decided to try for ten years.
It felt like a good, round number to reach.
As the YouTube game changed over the years,
as the channel became bigger,
as my own standards became higher and higher
to keep pace with all the people
I was collaborating with and competing with,
as this became my life–
I decided that my goal was ten years.
And that is today, as this is published.
4pm, January 1st, 2024.
So now it’s time to take a breather.
I can’t keep this up.
This is my dream job, and I have a lot of fun doing it.
I know I’m incredibly lucky.
But a dream job is still a job.
And it’s a job that keeps getting bigger and more complicated
and I am so tired!
There’s nothing in my life right now except work.
I did get close to burning out,
but fortunately I always knew when to step back from the brink.
And it’s not like I can drop the quality back down?
That’s not how YouTube works these days.
Over the last year or so, I have talked to some folks
who are more successful than me,
who were in this position a few years back.
And it’s clear that I now have two possible choices.
I could keep making bigger and better things,
keep climbing the ladder,
build a business, hire full-time employees…
and end up as a manager.
And that would be great for someone who isn’t me,
but I know I’m bad at that,
and I’d hate every second of it.
So, option 2… I could not do that,
I could do less, and be happier.
So I’m taking a break for… some time.
I don’t know when or if I come back,
but when I do, it won’t be weekly.
At least, not in this format, not here.
This probably isn’t goodbye-goodbye?
Like, not forever?
The podcast I host, Lateral, is still going out weekly,
my newsletter’s still going out,
the Plus channel will probably return at some point,
there’ll likely be new Technical Difficulties episodes,
there are links to all those things around here somewhere.
And there will probably be all-new projects here or somewhere else,
projects that are experimental and weird and can fail.
Because I miss doing stuff like that.
And when some fool comes along and goes “oh, you fell off,
“this new stuff isn’t getting the views is it?”…
Yeah. Okay. That’s fine.
This project has worked, and it’s time to move on.
I’m still going to be looking for interesting things to film here,
there’ll probably still be videos here from time to time,
I really do love doing this. There is a part of my brain
that desperately, desperately does not want this to end.
So if you’ve got an idea for a future video,
you can still tell me about it.
And one day, I might make it.
But right now, I need to spend time with people I hold dear,
I need there to be things in my life that are not work,
and it’s been years since that’s been true.
I never celebrated the milestones.
Subscriber numbers weren’t ever my goal.
So I never did any big so-many-subscribers thank you videos.
But, still… thank you.
To you watching, and to everyone who’s helped along the way.
I did think that I should end this
with a big, syrupy, sentimental, self-indulgent montage
and head off into the sunset…
…and you know what?
Just this once,
for the first time in ten years…
that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
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