This isn’t the standard
YouTuber burnout-apology video. And it’s not “oh, woe is me,
I’m leaving forever”. I’m going somewhere with this. Literally. I’ve been throwing stuff
at the internet since 1999. And for many, many years,
that stuff went almost nowhere. I had occasional bits of success, but could never make
any of them last long-term. I remember thinking, so many times
during all those years… will any of this
stuff I’m making ever work? Well, this did. I didn’t know that,
back when I was filming the first videos for the series
that was then called Things You Might Not Know, I just held out my phone
at arm’s length and talked into it for 90 seconds
with almost no research! I really don’t like
those videos now. But the first of them
was published exactly ten years
before this one. To the minute.
4pm, January 1st, 2014. For the first month
of that format, I was publishing a video
almost every day, and then I settled down:
one video a week. Mostly on location,
near windswept infrastructure, although there’s computer science
and linguistics in there too, and occasional green-screen
animated videos. I experimented with
other formats on other days, but the rule
I set myself was: Monday, 4pm,
something interesting. I never got to space. I never got to
the ocean depths. And I never got to fly harnessed
underneath a helicopter, I couldn’t find an excuse
to do that one. But I never missed a week. There’s been a few guest videos,
of course, and occasionally some
blatant filler. One time I just uploaded
two and a half hours of unedited footage of garlic bread
flying to the edge of space, and that turned into one of the
most viewed videos I’ve ever had. Sometimes a video would be
a day or two early or late for one reason or another.
But to my own satisfaction, which is ultimately the
only thing that I’m counting, there’s been a video a week
for ten years. I never broke the streak. I don’t know when I decided
to try for ten years. It felt like a
good, round number to reach. As the YouTube game
changed over the years, as the channel became bigger, as my own standards
became higher and higher to keep pace with all the people I was collaborating with
and competing with, as this became my life– I decided that my goal
was ten years. And that is today,
as this is published. 4pm, January 1st, 2024. So now it’s time
to take a breather. I can’t keep this up. This is my dream job, and
I have a lot of fun doing it. I know I’m incredibly lucky. But a dream job is still a job. And it’s a job that keeps getting
bigger and more complicated and I am so tired! There’s nothing in my life
right now except work. I did get close to burning out, but fortunately I always knew
when to step back from the brink. And it’s not like I can
drop the quality back down? That’s not how YouTube
works these days. Over the last year or so,
I have talked to some folks who are more successful than me, who were in this position
a few years back. And it’s clear that I now
have two possible choices. I could keep making
bigger and better things, keep climbing the ladder, build a business,
hire full-time employees… and end up as a manager. And that would be great for
someone who isn’t me, but I know I’m bad at that, and I’d hate every second of it. So, option 2…
I could not do that, I could do less,
and be happier. So I’m taking a break
for… some time. I don’t know when or
if I come back, but when I do,
it won’t be weekly. At least, not in this format,
not here. This probably isn’t
goodbye-goodbye? Like, not forever? The podcast I host, Lateral,
is still going out weekly, my newsletter’s still going out, the Plus channel will probably
return at some point, there’ll likely be new
Technical Difficulties episodes, there are links to all those things
around here somewhere. And there will probably be
all-new projects here or somewhere else, projects that are experimental
and weird and can fail. Because I miss doing
stuff like that. And when some fool comes along
and goes “oh, you fell off, “this new stuff isn’t getting
the views is it?”… Yeah. Okay. That’s fine. This project has worked,
and it’s time to move on. I’m still going to be looking for
interesting things to film here, there’ll probably still be videos
here from time to time, I really do love doing this.
There is a part of my brain that desperately, desperately
does not want this to end. So if you’ve got an idea
for a future video, you can still tell me about it. And one day, I might make it. But right now, I need to spend time
with people I hold dear, I need there to be things in my life
that are not work, and it’s been years
since that’s been true. I never celebrated
the milestones. Subscriber numbers
weren’t ever my goal. So I never did any big
so-many-subscribers thank you videos. But, still… thank you. To you watching, and to everyone
who’s helped along the way. I did think that
I should end this with a big, syrupy, sentimental,
self-indulgent montage and head off into the sunset… …and you know what? Just this once, for the first time
in ten years… that’s exactly what
I’m going to do.
