Introduction

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you would have noticed that although I do stream semi-consistently, I am active on my server, and I am active on my goodreads, I still don’t really upload that much. I have some videos that have done pretty well, and I have other videos ideas, some of which I have held off for 2 years. “So why is that?” you may be wondering to yourself. The answer to that is a lot easier than it seems, and I’ve been ashamed to say this for a long time.

Procrastination

Preface

I have fallen back into quite a few bad habits, and they’re mainly internal. These habits are habits of the mind, thought traps that I get stuck in that affect me externally. They manifest in procrastination and stem from perfectionism. They are rooted in insecurity that I had once destroyed but came out of the wood work due to unforeseen circumstances. It’s all in my head, and I know it. They’re all caused my external things that aren’t in my power to control or fix, and trying to brute-force improvement while adhering to the restrictions of my mind is like trying to run up a steep sand dune in runners – you can run up the hill, but it will be significantly harder than running up barefoot or by simply walking around it.

Grateful

What I am about to say isn’t in any way meant to stroke my ego. I don’t think super highly of myself but I know what I am worth. But I also do believe that I am not that much different from everyone else. I am just a guy who decided during covid to make a YouTube channel like smart tokki. That turned into me becoming somewhat of a jvscholz clone since I ended up really enjoying his old-tech aesthetic. I gained somewhat of a small following of about 1.58k subscribers and a Discord server of over 100 people – a feat I have never accomplished before. I ended up doing an “interview” with James some time later and through that, more eyes came to my channel. On top of that, another video of mine about tech blew up a bit. Both of those videos are my two highest performing videos every month. I am perfectly content with the amount of views I get too.

I am very grateful to be where I am right now. I am not big enough to have obsessive haters (but I do get the occasional bigoted/ignorant hate common), but I am not big enough to have a super big following from all over the world. I am not big enough to be recognized in the streets of my city, and I like that. It’s comfortable. I don’t make any money from content creation, nor do I receive any sponsorships of any kind.

Pressure

A wise Super Smash Brothers Melee commentator/legend Phil once said “Pressure makes Diamonds, Bobby”, and that’s stuck with me for a while. But I fell off of thinking about it due to external reasons. Although I had a system that once worked for me, I wanted to push out things that showed results, that showed that I was working on things and that progress was being made. I then started to doubt my own process, and fell into a state of perfectionism. No one can see what I am doing until it is complete perfect because imperfection is wrong and bad and ugly. That’s been my on-going line of thinking for the past 5-7 months, and until recently it was at its worse. The problem doesn’t lie in the pressure itself; the problem lies in how you deal with the pressure.

Due to the numbers rising with my channel, along with the attention growing, I get more anxious as time goes on. These arbitrary numbers which signify “relevance” or “clout” don’t mean much, but they mean something to other people. It’s the trap of thinking about what others might be thinking about you in that moment, or what people would think about you under X or Y circumstances. Notice the bold letters and try to see the correlation.

The correlation is that the things being talked about haven’t happened, and there’s no concrete evidence to support them at all. I can’t read minds, and so can’t you. But I remember being a shithead kid thinking lower of YouTubers if they didn’t have a certain subscriber:view ratio. I remember talking shit about other channels thinking I was hot shit so whenever I see my own content, I look at it from the young bully-toki perspective instead of the mature-toki one.

Fear

I am afraid of having a video flop. I am afraid of having a video that people don’t want to see. I am afraid of not meeting the needs of the people who watch my videos. I am afraid of not telling the story I want to tell. I am afraid of being misunderstood or my words being used against me. I am afraid of being misinterpreted and manipulated. I am afraid of losing control of my channel and content. I am afraid of letting down those who watch my content and enjoy my personality. But I feel like I am enabling this the more I make “study youtuber” content. I have hobbies and interests that I have been meaning to make videos on for a long time, but I have been afraid to make anything in fear of alienating a part of my audience that came from both the James and Thinkpad wave. I am more than just those two videos, and I am more than just being another “thinkpad guy”. It’s the fear of losing my identity while also actively suppressing the expression of my identity. I look back at my older videos sometimes and see how active and expressive I was, how happy I looked to be even making videos in the first place. I didn’t care. But I started caring, and I started caring too much, and I started caring about the wrong things.

Conclusion

I’m just a kid. I’m 22, afraid of what the future holds, and afraid of losing my identity. I have struggled with my identity and impostor syndrome for a good portion of my life, and I am still getting over it. The point of this post is to be transparent about what I am feeling with the channel, and to reassure that I am not going to abandon uploading altogether. It’s taking some time, but I will get there again. I know I will, because I’ve done it time and time again. Pressure makes diamonds, and I won’t break under my own pressure this time. If I do, it’s fine. I’ll get back up and try again. I can’t quit now. I don’t want to quit. No more running away from opportunities.