An Updated User’s Guide for the Aged and Alt-Brained
A Guide for Parents of Content Creators
To all parents out there with teens (or even toddlers and younger adults) consuming or creating content on YouTube, this article is a must for you.
Let me explain: on my 70th, 1st of September this year, I embarked on a journey, an experiment, so to speak, triggered by a close friend’s loss. She lost her daughter to suicide. Her loss is social media-related.
I’ll never divulge the details here, but suffice it to say that a young woman, bright, intelligent, privileged, and so so happy (we all thought), offed herself after demonitization from the platform.
As a retired technologist, this brought me back. As a writer disgusted with the publishing industry, this brought me back. As a human being, this hurt me deeply. I, too, have suffered a suicide or two in my lineage.
So, I decided to become a YouTube content creator (as an experiment) myself to see how bad (or good) being a young content creator is these days and on the myriad of platforms where all the content flows in 2023.
The Hypothesis
Being a content creator on YouTube can be debilitating at best and kill you at its worst.
Note: I forgot to tell you that I am a fake scientist with no degrees remotely related to sociology or biology.
So, I began a double-blind experiment by creating about 50 bits of YouTube content, a few dozen community posts, and other activities required as a content creator. The entire shebang, I went all in. This has been a three-month non-clinical self-trial.
Sidebar: I’ve been writing about this creator experience here and there, with very little attention being paid, and now I am going for it, so to speak; I will see these words on the front of WAPO or NYT before I die, mark my words (or restack them): techBros must die! Mark my tombstone. I am so fighting mad, and you should be as well if you are a parent on this planet right now.
I won’t bore you with charts, graphs, and statistics collected, tabulated, and analyzed during my three months as a creator on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, Facebook Original, Facebook Reels, and more that I can’t remember, sorry, too much discord…oh that’s right, Discord! That one, too.
That’s a lot of data and analysis to present- a boatload. So I won’t. F it. Here is a bulleted list, as I know every parent loves a good PowerPoint:
- The profession of content creation is valid, decent, engaging, and fulfilling. The platforms your child’s content runs on are nothing of the sort, nor are the CEOs and tech bros that design these platforms; they have no interest in your child except to extract as much gelt as possible.
- Being a content creator is almost magical; how do you describe it? I’ve been everything in my life, from floor swabber to AI researcher, and I have never had so much fun working in the past three months as I have in 30 years. The downside is that I invested thousands of dollars in this new small business, and during the first quarter, my revenue was 22 US dollars and 54 cents. USD 24.54 and some 4,000 USD and counting now spent. Even if I were 18 and could give a crap about ROI or know what it means, I’d say screw this.
- Being a content creator, while fun, is a helluva lot of work and is not the traditional kind of work that an artist, writer, or radio/tv announcer would ever deal with, well not in any traditional way. Methods of self-promotion are many and expensive both in time and money spent. Getting trapped into a subscription list of helper apps a mile long is easy.
- The work is strenuous. Content creation is athletic. I monitored my health for the entire three months using my watch. I am a 70-year-old male in perfect health as of my 70th birthday when I began running this experiment into the unknown. My health charts all plunged, and many rings were left unfilled; enough said.
- The work is all-consuming. No matter what the content job title is, it’s the same. Make-up artist, Classical Music explainer, Box-opening reviewer, ASMR mime (look that one up if you don’t know), and many more new job classifications online. You know what they do; you scroll, too.
- You are mentally engaged with your work 24/7; there is no avoiding that. You see something, hear something, touch something, and you are immediately thinking of the next show, episode, or shot in the video going up next.
- The work is physically challenging, well, only so much if your content is gymnastics, another sport, or a strenuous activity where you film yourself. If not, well, at best, you are a couch potato in front of the laptop, never seeing the light of day, or worse, doing a cooking show with pets as I do, and never seeing the light of day unless I went and ran with my wolf every time I felt anxious about the job.
- The work can overwhelm you. Which it did many times a day; each time, the crap imposed by Youtube and all the other platforms that I was posting on began to overwhelm me with offers to spend more or restrict and ban me more. They will drive you mad, and the lack of transparency about policies and procedures as a platform provider for your content is almost criminal.
So, both mentally and physically, I was beaten and left beaten up. Maybe your child won’t or isn’t that weak or timid; I am 70, after all.
Well, dear parent or concerned and diligent reader (you made it this far), here is where any good scientist would summarize the findings, interpret the data in the context of the hypothesis, discuss the results’ implications, and suggest directions for future research.
Let me cut through all that crap; as a parent myself, I know you have no time for that. So here it is, again in PowerPoint format:
- Content creation is a valid and worthwhile activity and potential career path for teens, young adults, heck, anyone. Even my 7-year-old niece is into it, and her content is good.
- As a small business, the entry costs are high, and the return is zilch until you hit the jackpot—more on this in a later update to this guide. Explaining how things are rigged on these platforms is an entire chapter, and I have some numbers I want to show you that prove this!
- You can be thrown off any platform at any moment for a long list of reasons, most out of the content creator’s control. In short, there are no workplace rights or other employee benefits. You are at the mercy of the techBros 100 percent-better plan accordingly, or else.
- Mentally, the job is way more challenging than one would expect by just viewing a creator’s content. No, you don’t see the labor that went in, as with all creative endeavors, but the difference is that there is no HR department while you are creating for YouTube, no med station when you start having a breakdown or migraine.
I suspect the longer one continues to create, the more one’s mental state declines. It could be mild anxiety to suicide. I have no data to show you now. I have articles stacked in my brain on this topic, so you will have to wait, sorry.
My Final Inferences and Suggestions for Future Research
Conclusion
This is simple. Don’t let anyone you know or love create content on YouTube without them knowing the risks and pitfalls described above and without stringent “trust but verify” monitoring.
In addition, younger ones should be monitored as you did when they first got a phone or began using social media, even if they are 27. At least for a few months, then periodic check-ins. This must be a serious topic of discussion at many dinner tables of the content creator.
For future related research, please follow me on Medium.com, as this is not a conclusion but a burning quest for me, and hopefully, an interest for you and your related content creator.
Stay strong and best of lu…. no, not luck, reasoned action!
In addition to sharing insights, I’m involved in a cause providing pizza to underprivileged children in Kathmandu, Nepal. If you wish to support them, please contribute through my [Buy Me a Coffee]( https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nepalihipph) page; there is an excellent video on my simple project. Each donation brings joy to these children that you would not believe (but I will send you pics). Your generosity, big or small, makes a difference. Thank you for any support you can offer.
This article is dedicated to Bo Burnham, one of the younger people that, at 70, I kind of worry about:
Originally published at https://herojig.substack.com.
