YouTube And The Human Condition

Every few days I get a message from someone asking me about my forgotten YouTube channel.

When are you going to make another video?

We miss you.

The most recent one I like: Come back and save us!

Dramatics aside, I guess I do owe you all an explanation for my disappearing from that platform entirely. I can see how confusing that must have been for me to completely drop it one day and never come back.

Here’s what happened:

Back at the height of my obsession with all things film I decided that I was going to give YouTube a serious shot. Not just casually uploading videos, but really trying. The plan was to upload a video once per week. It didn’t matter what it was, so long as I was putting something new out. Easy enough, right? Could have been anything—videos about guitars, about cameras, about microphones, even just videos of me talking. The point was to keep me on track, keep me organized. Have some kind of a deadline every week. That way I could feel loose and warmed up for when I wanted to do make the short films that I was actually wanting to work toward. What I didn’t expect was how much work was involved. Between coming up with ideas, filming, editing, coloring, sound design, etc, it quickly became a full time job. And, while I made some cool stuff that I can look back on and get all nostalgic over, it was clear that if I wanted to stick this out long term it was going to be this vs everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, I had some really cool opportunities. Made a few music videos for my friends1, my own band2, and got to experience what pursuing that would look like.

Share

While that was all good and fun, truly, I didn’t love being a “YouTube guy” enough to step back from everything else I wanted to be working on too. After six to eight months I realized it had become a numbers game. How do I top my previous videos? How can I play with thumbnails to attract new viewers (even if they’re ridiculous and stupid)?

By the time the year was over all the fun had been sucked out of it. I was making videos for an algorithm I didn’t even want to be a part of, not because it was enjoyable.

There were a handful of reasons why I stepped away, really. That was just one of them.

Another was that I started feeling like my channel was becoming just an extension of the band and not what I wanted it to be. I set out with this idea that I’d have a platform dedicated to the things that I liked and the projects I wanted to work on, but I was on tour so often that I couldn’t help but switch gears and adapt for the sake of keeping up. And, yeah, I get it, I’m not an idiot. I kind of brought it upon myself for making a large majority of my videos behind the scenes content on tour. I guess I thought in some naive way that the artsy-fartsy side of things would shadow over everything else.

I have to remember that this is YouTube, and the cool shot that captures the moment isn’t going to be something that gets an eyelash batted at. Especially not up against a fart joke, or something.

All of these things made my YouTube experience a bit bittersweet. Did I enjoy it? Of course. Was it fun? Absolutely.

But I had a whole other side of things that drove me nuts.

Like I mentioned before, a big part of doing all of this was my way of working toward what I really wanted at the time, which was to make movies. Short films. Something with story. With heart. And here I was doing the complete opposite of that. Following my friends around with a camera and vlogging. Paying attention to audience and likes and all the stuff that shouldn’t matter. Even doing the bigger projects that I really wanted to be doing: the music videos, the short films, etc, I started to realize that people weren’t all that dependable. Which was a whole other set of issues on its own.

I guess that’s what happens you try to involve your friends, make them show up at a specific time on a random Wednesday to shoot a script you wrote about toilets clogging and it being a whole neighborhood issue. Come on guys, this is serious stuff. My whole film career is hinging on whether or not you nail this take about how there’s only five or six shits left in the house.

I’m not even joking that this is a real idea I wrote a full pilot script for.

Listen, I didn’t say I was funny.

Share

Anyway, while I had a blast shooting stuff for myself, with my friends, and otherwise, I was also tired of depending on everyone else to get my idea out. If you’ve never done anything film related, just know that everybody has a job and everyone must do that job for there to be a final project to show. One weak link makes the whole thing suffer. No offense to all my friends, who are great people and have helped the best they can, but it became clear that this wasn’t the thing they wanted to be doing like I did. Unfortunately people will never care as much about your project as you do.

All of this sort of funneled down into me turning toward writing instead.

I had this idea for a movie a few years prior to all of this that I’d written an outline for and thought, what if I wrote this as a book instead? I’d always wanted to write a novel and maybe this is the perfect opportunity to do it. Plus, then I don’t need to worry about the guy running the camera showing up twenty minutes late to a shoot, so we have to push our entire list of call times back. I don’t have to cross my fingers and hope one of my friends doesn’t show up two hours after the fact because his personal clock doesn’t run in time with the real world.

Just me and the page and endless possibilities.

Which, now that I’m writing this all down, is maybe exactly how it was always supposed to be.

I can sit back and be thankful for all of these “setbacks” and annoyances because they prompted me to write that first book, further fueling my love of writing narrative fiction. Sending me deeper down that rabbit hole. For being that lightbulb moment of realization that this is the thing I was supposed to be doing.

Plus, it seems like the universe wants me vomiting words onto the page, even if it feels a bit like screaming into a void at times, so that’s what I’m going to keep doing.

YouTube as a platform is great, yeah. It didn’t get me where I wanted, exactly, but it set me down a path of where I was supposed to be. Sometimes it feels like outside forces push you in a specific direction and, when you don’t listen, it pushes harder.

It’s been over two years since I uploaded my last video and people continue to subscribe, continue to ask when I’m coming back.

The answer, for now, is that writing has my heart and I don’t know that I want to be doing anything else. Will I ever upload again? I’m sure I will. But I very much doubt it will be in the capacity or content of what it used to be.

Sometimes we have to take a minute to close our eyes. Listen to the wind rustling through the leaves. Feel it with our whole body, the way the goosebumps chase up our skin, make their way to our neck, our head, our ears. If we listen hard enough, we may just hear what the universe is trying to tell us.

And you may even like where you end up.