For The Love Of The Void

Not that I've noticed one recently, but I've always wondered what's the thought process behind creators quitting their platforms, more specifically YouTube creators hanging up the mic and somehow disappearing into the ether after almost a decade of grinding.

Obviously, sometimes it's for personal reasons, arguably all reasons to quit are personal in some shape or form.

The differentiation I'm making is this aspect of change coming from getting seriously burned out, not loving the game anymore, and/or finding relatively better things to engage on.

Unlike athletes, I think the "career path" of creators can be quite long, with the main factor being the body isn't the primary limitation. However, the act of creation does really sap out the energy.

To understand that drain, one has to look at why people create in the first place.

Need for expression

Most creators start because they love something. We have ideas bubbling over and this need to share, connect, make people laugh or think. There's a purity to early content that comes via genuine excitement but at some point, the thing you loved becomes the thing you have to do or so you tell yourself.

Quite the opposite to Naval's observation of doing what seems like play to you but work to others. Although on the outside it may still seem like so, on the inside the tables have shifted.

Even if it's just a tangent, it is fascinating to picture the whole situation as a creator spending a decade filling a "void" of the internet with content, only to find that their final act of love for themselves is to return to that silence and become a ghost again.

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Ironically, this burnout has a pattern of hitting right when you're successful or just about to be, i.e. the "dream job" finally pays off to reveal itself as a gilded cage, which is an indirect way of being trapped by your own achievement.

One also has to confront the parasocial weight of having thousands of people feel like they know you, have expectations of you, demand explanations, etc.

Collective exhaustion

Just thinking about it out loud makes me sigh at the invisible psychological tax that comes with being both a person and a brand in the same body.

The modern world is a crazy feedback loop once you've assimilated into the bubble of constant output. Internet of today is not the internet of five years ago and will not be the same Internet ten years from now. Who really can keep up with the treadmill when it keeps speeding up and never stops?

In some ways, this whole phenomenon of digital vanishing really touches on the broad, collective exhaustion of modernity.

We are all tired. On both sides of the spectrum. Creators are tired of performing. Audiences are also arguably tired of consuming at such high speeds.

Even taking a break doesn't help much if you have to come back to the same arena that made you tired in the first place. Only a temporary solution.

I'm not sure this will count as a way to somehow align with Naval’s play to you work to others but one potential way out is to stop being the "product" yourself. Build systems or assets that work for you which then allows the creator to step out of the frame while the value they've created lives on without demanding their presence's presence.


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Posted Using INLEO