The art of trying to make something that you would try not to watch.
Cognitive Dissonance is the ability to hold two opposing points of view at the same time.
I think of myself as someone with an addictive personality. I have a tendency of overthinking and have a rather destructive perfectionistic streak that leads me to overplan in the useless goal of having more control of my situation.
In reality I think I manage myself pretty well, with the exception of one thing. Youtube.
I can delete the other social media apps off my phone, follow every health and fitness goal I set myself, and feed time into my passions whilst working full time, but I can’t kick that little red button.
I have a video on, in the background whilst writing this article.
Maybe it’s indicative of being overwhelmed – I often have many projects on the go, and as a consequence when sitting down to work on something, it’s hard to know where to start and easy to bring up a video. I feel like my brain often takes some time to compute the given situation, and in the meantime my hands automatically open a video, so that I at least have something on in the background whilst I’m slowly trying to work out what I’m supposed to be doing.
Maybe that’s the worst part of it. That I don’t really watch it to appreciate the videos. I watch, or more accurately don’t watch it to distract myself, or to feel less alone. Youtube is full of amazing, intricate and beautiful creations, and I basically use it to listen to the audio of someone pressure washing something.
So making videos specifically designed for youtube sometimes feels like it makes me a little bit of a hypocrite.
Youtube is an appealing place. A mystical land where anyone can be successful, and niche topics and passions are celebrated. At least it starts that way, and then gets more and more completely unnecessary. Yet that algorithm has got me, and got me strong. It knows the videos that I’m trying to avoid as they make me insecure, and it knows that if it shows them to me enough I’ll watch them anyway. It knows that I like listening to the sound of rain whilst I concentrate, and that I’m stupid enough to try a new rain video that might be more realistic.
So should I strive to make our videos less watchable? Or on a different platform?
Should I give up using thumbnails and promotions, and stop editing our videos so they’re all a painful 3 hours long? Maybe I’ll just go down to my local park, and show random people on my phone until I’m asked to leave.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do one that way, just to see what it feels like. I’ll yell ‘DID THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO TRY SOMETHING TO LOOK AFTER YOURSELF? right in that poor child’s face. In the meantime I’ll battle on with Youtube, in more ways than one.
Crafting Good Health 