‘YouTube gave me 1.8 million followers, but my life became a product’ – 02/06/2023 – Market

My life so far has been distilled into numbers: 1.7 million subscribers, 1.8 million total followers, 155 million views. At age 12 I started posting videos on YouTube. In November, aged 24, I gave up.

When I tell people about my videos, I often say, “Imagine if Ferris Bueller had a YouTube channel.” I used the style and conventions of nostalgic teen movies to romanticize what was simply an ordinary life.

On YouTube, a romanticized life is also, paradoxically, deeply personal. My channel was as raw and honest as I would have been in my diary. That’s part of the culture. Being known as you are – and praised for it – attracts those who have a deep desire to be seen.

But another part of culture is turning yourself into a product and figuring out how to sell it. Success is measured in view and subscriber counts, visible to everyone. The numbers feel like an adrenaline shot in your self-esteem. Approval is addictive, but its lows also hit hard.

The career I built on YouTube is one that millions of young people still dream of. Many of them start making videos to share with an audience that really wants to listen. And then, with 1,000 subscribers, YouTube can send the first check; if the number of entries increases, so will the deals and collaborations with brands that often lead to fame and fortune. When done right, YouTube can quickly become a lucrative career. But maintaining it is a delicate balancing act; sometimes, as with me, the sacrifices required are too dangerous to be worth it.

The height of my YouTube career didn’t always live up to my childhood fantasy of what that kind of fame would be like. Instead, I was constantly terrified of losing my audience and the validation they gave me. My self-esteem became so intertwined with my career that maintaining it really felt like a matter of life and death. I was trapped in an endless cycle of constantly trying to outdo myself in order to stay relevant.

YouTube soon became a game of “What’s the craziest thing you would do to get attention?”

My answer? Legally marry my sister’s boyfriend. (It was meant to be an inconsequential joke. Our union has since been annulled.)

Nearly three million people watched that video; by the numbers, I must count you and others like it as successes. But I feel overwhelming guilt when I look back on all those who naively participated in my videos. A part of me feels I took advantage of their own desire to be seen. I gained fame and success by exploiting their lives. They do not.

Yet I, too, was a teenager, making decisions based on the visibility our culture teaches us to crave. I knew my audience wanted to feel my authenticity. To give you that, I revealed parts of myself that would be wiser to keep secret.

We place such a high value on visibility, so isn’t it natural to feel that our vulnerability is the price we pay to be validated?

But when metrics replace self-esteem, it’s easy to fall into the trap of giving away precious pieces of yourself to feed an audience that’s always hungry for more and more.

Documenting my darkest moments started to feel like the only way people could really understand me. In 2018, I impulsively released a video about my struggle with burnout, which featured intimate footage of my emotional meltdowns. These meltdowns were, in part, a product of severe anxiety and depression caused by the very pursuit of success that many other teenagers crave.

My “burnout” video didn’t end my career; brought me even more attention, both from the wider YouTube community and the news media. Sharing it meant that I was seen as authentic, but also that I had turned into a product some of the most devastating moments of my life. After that, I felt pressured to constantly comment on problems in my private life that I didn’t know how to solve.

However, I continued making videos. In hindsight, the ones I made back then lacked the passionate spark that was once the key to my success. It started to feel like I was playing a version of myself that I had outgrown. I was stepping into adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic” I had to be the product I had long posted online, as opposed to the person I was becoming.

Online culture encourages young people to become a product at an age when they are just starting to figure out who they are. When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve created aligned with yourself becomes an impossible dilemma. Changing one’s personality online is something few have succeeded at, so most are too afraid to risk their livelihood and try. Remaining unchanged brings its own challenges – stagnation, inauthenticity, burnout. The instability brought by growth is what commonly makes this career short.

As with many, the pandemic marked a turning point for me. There was never a definite moment when I decided to leave YouTube, but for a year I didn’t post. As time passed, I realized that I would not return.

Sometimes I barely recognize the person I used to be. Though a part of me resents that I’ll never be able to get over her, I’m also grateful for her. My YouTube channel, despite all the hassle it brought me, connected me with people who wanted to hear my stories and prepared me for a real shot at directing. Last year I directed a short film and I’m writing a feature, which showed me new ways of creating that don’t affect my privacy.

Many have made a career online and found happiness in it. Far more young people still struggle for that kind of success and the validation it brings. But for those who will follow the path I did, I hope they learn from my experience. Not everyone deserves their vulnerability. Use these platforms to open up opportunities, but not at the cost of revealing everything about yourself.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves