I Hit 100,000 Subscribers. It was ok.

I was sitting with my wife when I got the text, “Congrats on 100k, brother!” It was a Sunday evening, so I had been away from my laptop for the better part of the past two days. The only way I know how to keep an ounce of sanity while making a living as a YouTuber is taking tech sabbaths. Otherwise, the hamster wheel of YouTube Studio refreshes, the constant striving after the screen that explodes into confetti when your latest video outperforms the previous ten, and the dopamine-optimized color-coding will all conspire to drive you mad.

I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t want to grab my laptop and confirm that I’d crossed the milestone. Earlier in the week, people had offered anticipatory congratulations, so I couldn’t be sure that I had in fact summited that silver play button mountain based on one text alone, but I refrained.

It could wait until the morning.

On Monday, I went through my normal routine. Woke up at 5:11am (Eliza takes precisely 11 minutes to get ready in the morning, I’ve got the timing down to a science), did morning prayers with her, finished off my morning routines after she left, and by mid-morning, I was logging on to my laptop to start the portion of my workday that requires a glowing screen.

And there it was. 100,000 subscribers. And all I felt was —

Getting There

Rewind the clock a few years, and I remember when my YouTube channel first started to get some traction. I had been making multiple videos a week for over a year, and I still had barely cracked 100 subscribers, averaging about 10 views per video. It’s a cliché, but I really was in it for the love of the game. You have to be when no one’s watching and you’re not making any money.

Dumb luck, providence, perseverance—whatever it was, eventually things changed. I remember when I hit 1,000 subscribers, my sister sent me custom M&M’s to my college dorm room as a congratulations gift.

By the time they arrived I had nearly hit 10,000.

That’s just how these things go sometimes. Overnight “success” after years of toil. You know the deal.

When I hit 10,000 subscribers, I remember my mom gave me a call to congratulate me. At some point, she asked, “what’s next?” and without skipping a beat I said, “100,000.”

If I wanted to put a positive spin on it, I’d say it was just me being driven, setting one of those SMART goals we learned about in school. And yeah, I guess being competitive and backing myself to “succeed” has probably helped me in life.

But it was mainly pride. Lust for more. I had touched the One Ring of seeming notoriety and I was hooked.

That was several years ago. For awhile, the channel continued growing at a pretty fast pace, but eventually things slowed down. I pivoted away from the more algorithmically-optimized approach of putting my own religious journey front and center and tried to step back a bit. Just focus on theology, the stuff I really loved, rather than the type of content that had propelled the channel to that point which focused on, “Protestant goes to Catholic Church” and filled the comments with “when will he convert?”

It was a shift that was much more fulfilling for me, but also meant that the elusive 100,000 subscriber milestone seemed to stretch farther into the distance.

When I hit 10,000 subscribers, I would’ve estimated I would hit 100,000 in about two years or so. It took five.

The Milestone

And maybe that’s part of the reason why, when the moment finally came, I didn’t really feel much.

I know when you hit milestones like this you’re supposed to say, “wow, I never believed this would happen.” I’ve even found myself reaching for those words. They sound right. The culturally appropriate humble brag. Maybe in some sense they’re true. If you would’ve asked me if I’d hit 100,000 subscribers when I had 100, I probably would’ve said no. But of course, that was years ago. Whether it was warranted or not, I certainly believed I’d do it when I had 10,000 subscribers, and it was pretty obvious for awhile now that this would happen. These things don’t generally happen overnight, so even if you didn’t believe it at 50,000, don’t tell me you didn’t at 99,000.

It’s not that I felt nothing when I saw that number. It felt nice, I suppose. I gave a slight nod of the head, lips curled up at the corners, and I said to myself, “there it is.”

But that was about it.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to dissect this. Was it the fact that it was slow in coming? Was it that I knew it would happen?

It’s not that I’m incapable of feeling emotions. I’ve hit other milestones that were much more, slack-jawed “wow” than head-nodding “nice.” And some that elicited the former reaction from myself would be considered objectively less impressive by many than the latter.

So why is that?

I still don’t fully know, but I’ve got a few ideas.

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Vanity

Ecclesiastes famously kicks off with, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” King Jimmy’s translators really outdid themselves with that one. The loveliness of the prose is the perfect juxtaposition with its message. Like Lucretius, the Roman philosopher who would later say that he coated his bitter Epicurean truths in the honey of the Muses to make them go down easier, the author of Ecclesiastes offers pretty words to get at a darker truth: We’re toiling for things that don’t really matter.

As long as you play along, mistaking vanity for reality, you get all the sweetness of Lucretius’s honey. But when you see that the emperor has no clothes, things are different.

And that’s the first thing that I think had this milestone feeling a bit lackluster: it doesn’t really mean anything.

Any YouTuber will tell you that subscribers are pretty much a vanity metric. In terms of the algorithm, YouTube cares fairly little about how many subscribers you have. At best, they’re a lagging indicator, but they might also just be a holdover from days past. In other words, of the 100,000 subscribers I have, I trust many stopped watching years ago, and that’s ok. On the other hand, about half of the people who watch my videos these days aren’t subscribed. YouTube doesn’t really care. It just wants to keep people on the platform by showing them videos it thinks they’ll like, whether they’re subscribed to that person or not. That’s why YouTubers often push people to turn on notifications. It’s one of the only ways to make that subscription turn into views.

Anyway, enough of that, suffice to say, part of the reason 100,000 subscribers might not have felt like much is, well, I already knew it was vanity.

I hope this doesn’t come across overly nihilistic. In many ways, it was liberating because I didn’t expect it to feel like much. A younger me would’ve been waiting non-stop for the dopamine rush of seeing that number expand to six figures. These days, I didn’t place much weight of expectation on it. It came, it went, and that was that. Perhaps it’s also that it’s now my job, and, as a result, I care slightly more about the “revenue” tab on the backend than “subscribers.” I don’t mean this in a mercenary way. I mean it in a, “we’ve got a mortgage” way.

Wisdom?

If neither Socrates nor Augustine claimed to be wise, I won’t either. The Isle of the Blessed and the beholding of the Forms still elude me, a mere cave-dweller.

And yet, even in the Cave, I think I’ve learned a few things along the way. I know enough to know that numbers on a screen don’t actually make you happy, so it’s best not to ask them to do so.

It’s not that I get know joy out of doing what I do. Much the opposite. I still pinch myself that I get to spend my days reading, writing, and thinking about the topics I love most. When I say it’s a dream job, I’m not offering platitudes. The doing of it is a gift.

And when those numbers on a screen transform into faces, things are a bit different. When I hear people’s stories and see on their faces that somehow, God has used the work I do to impact their lives, it’s a deeply moving experience. A much more genuinely, “I can’t believe this is happening” than when that line is used for metrics that can be mathematically predicted.

And it’s that part of the job, the beauty and burden of touching real lives, that I would’ve told that kid in his dorm room really matters. If I could slip through the door to Culbertson Hall 403, I’d look at that kid on the phone with his mom, place a hand on his shoulder and tell him to take a breath before answering, saying 100,000 was next. As long as he chased that, it wouldn’t do much for him. Having hit it, I can promise him it pales in comparison to having even one person say, “this video changed my life.” And I’d tell him to focus on the stuff that plays a role in the latter rather than striving after the former. And when it happens, don’t believe you were the one that did it. You’re not that special. I’d tell him the numbers on a screen are just that. The joy is found in the people, not the pixels.

This time, when my mom called me, she didn’t ask what was next. If she had, I’m sure my first words would’ve been, “I don’t know.” But I hope they would’ve been followed by, “I’m just grateful to do this” and even more so, “I’ll just keep offering fish and loaves to the One to whom I owe all. He may multiply them. He may not. More than anything, I pray I’m just faithful to doing that to which He’s called me. Pray I don’t screw this up, please.” And hopefully, I’d end by saying, “thank you. I love you.”

Finally, Thank You

Which is how I want to end this piece as well. On the one hand, this piece has been about the fact that, this milestone doesn’t mean what I might’ve once thought. That’s the main message here. But, on the other hand, it is a good opportunity to pause and say thank you. When people first started watching my videos, I remember being overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude—and frankly, surprise—that people cared about what I had to say. I’ve tried to maintain that sense, but I know I haven’t done so perfectly. I’m working on it.

So, to all of you who have watched my videos, read my articles, bought my book, or just been along for the ride, thank you. It’s been quite the adventure. I have no crystal ball to see the future, but I pray that whatever it holds, it would come from and lead others toward a deep love for Christ, who is far better and far more beautiful than we’ll ever realize.

Much love for you all.