Lately, I’ve become a lot more consistent with making YouTube content, but it’s not because of any sort of planning or anything – it’s because I’ve become a lot more stubborn, dogged, and just don’t really care as much what people think.
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten a little older now, maybe it’s because I no longer care, or maybe it was a skill issue – I won’t really know until I do my self-analysis, which I hope to do progressively as I compare my scripts to what I’ve done along the way, which I would like to do and hopefully will succeed at some time soon.
Anyway, I thought this would be a fun post to think about what I’m putting out there and why, which kind of extends to the question of what I’m doing with social media anyway.
But first…
Why Even YouTube?
YouTube to me is one of the best art forms that I have access to, and it’s one of the most enjoyable pastimes to me. It’s not even a pastime that I’m particularly good at, but it’s something that gives me meaning in a whole bunch of different ways because it’s enjoyable – something that blends together my feelings at any moment with that wish somehow to craft things for this world.
You see, YouTube is about videos, and videos are an immersive experience and a recorded section of reality.
The thing is (and we could go deep philosophical into this but this really isn’t the point of this blog post) videos don’t even have to be about the tangible and the everyday – they can just be selections or samplings of experiences that narrow down that experience into a single channel; a collection of moments seen, created, formed – a targeted crafting of reality that is very different from say, writing a blog post like this.
Don’t get me wrong – I love writing.
Think about it – I dedicate time towards making these posts here, without any real expectation of profit or otherwise – it’s just because I enjoy putting the words together, have fun bringing together the sentences – I wouldn’t be doing this if all there was to it was just earning some money or otherwise.
But creating videos is just so much more of a multi-modal thing, in which writing is just a single component; indeed, the creator of any video that another person watches is creating what I could most accurately describe as a ‘shared reality’ constructed out of different component parts, which I’ll talk about more in another blog post perhaps.
Back to writing – I could be making clips where I’m just doing stupid stunt after stupid stunt with no writing involved whatsoever: No writing involved.
But 99% of other things still definitely require writing, from my experience, to script, to decide how the vibe will be, to structure, to plan – none of which are things that I’m particularly good at but am trying to get better at.
But the more I think about it, I feel that YouTube is both one of the most freeing pastimes but also one of the most difficult ones – freeing in the sense that you can bring together ideas in whatever form that you want, but also super difficult because what you deem coherent is dependent on your personal standards – and I have some pretty high standards.
Maybe that’s why I feel that frankly, sometimes creating YouTube videos feels like building an aeroplane while riding the plane itself.
Creating videos involves so many things, though, that depend upon one another – Maybe it’s because I’m not great at doing this yet, but I often find myself struggling in the zone of stringing clips together to make sure they’re logical, looking at the individual clips to see if they’re visually appealing and they tell the story effectively, and seeing the pacing… Then going back, realizing that what I conveyed was not what I wanted to convey at all in the first place, choosing to reset, refresh, and creating a brand new video and doubling all the effort that I made before.
To say the very least, I’m not very efficient at creating them – but then, nobody ever said that constructing a shareable reality should be easy, but then also nobody ever said that there was an authority that was supposed to divinely arbitrate the universal good or bad apart from the amorphous market of human preferences and choices as attuned to the modern content sharing and advertising ecosystem in which we are all cogs.
Whatever capitalistic implications there are in this ecosystem though (which I won’t deny exist), I’d just say that there is this joy that comes about when I make clips, say things that make sense, tell jokes that sometimes flop, other times pull through and dominate an entire video, when I share things that shape, reframe, and remold how people think – something that almost inevitably requires me to sit down, reflect my thoughts through hundreds of mirrors, and then bring out the very best.
