Last year I decided to try my hand at content creation on YouTube.
I ended up doing five videos which picked up a grand total of twenty one subscribers, got some comments, and one video got well over a hundred views. Nothing earth shattering, but kind of cool since I didn’t tell anyone at all I was doing this. I never promoted my channel in any way, other than posting the videos here (and I haven’t told anyone about this site either).
While it was fun and I learned a little more about video editing, I came to realize that the sheer amount of time needed to keep a channel going is simply unsustainable for me.
The effort it takes just to get a piece of content done is amazing. Scripting, lighting, sound, shooting, editing 1 all takes time. A lot of time, which is something I have precious little of.
Now I know there are those out there that who would simply pshaw at not having enough time 2:
“You need to sacrifice everything to make it, man!”
“You gotta hustle, man! You gotta griiiind!”
Listen, the Hustle/Grind Culture thing is toxic and grossly misleading. Like everything else, there are a lucky few who manage to break through the cracks and make it. For everyone else, the grind becomes expectation, and hardly anyone achieves the promised pot of gold.
The Grind only leads to burnout. Which leads to stress and illness.
An old manager said to me regarding raises and promotions: “There are rarely salary bumps. We reward hard work with more work”.
I have a family that I love and I work to make sure they’re happy. I have a good job that I enjoy. Both of these things take up a good chunk of my life, and I jealously covet my time outside of work and I refuse to ignore this for a small slice of the YouTube global audience.
I’m well past the time in my life where I could make it in any artistic career. In my late twenties, I made a conscious decision to stop pursuing art as a career and, for lack of a better term, I “sold out”. I got trained up in computers, snagged a job in IT and have done pretty well for myself and my family.
Music, visual art, video creation are fun for me. It’s what relaxes me during the down time that I do have. Why ruin that by hustling and grinding away my free time to pump out YouTube videos that won’t even guarantee any kind of success?
I made a conscious decision: I’ve deleted the Low Budget Lifer YouTube channel. I didn’t even want to keep it up as a “hobby” or whatever, I wanted to be completely off the platform.
I am still playing around with video creation, and any that I complete will be will be posted on this very site. When I want. How I want.
1: Then there is the obsession with stats. When one of the videos got enough views to open up the stats a little more, I stared going back again and again and again to look at the graphs and charts – even though there was very little happening.
2: This fucking guy. I could do a whole rant about this dude because: JFC, really?