Is “YouTuber” the purest creative occupation of all time?
In my imagination you (the YouTuber) spend your days in cathartic cycles of pain, joyful stillness, and proto-manic drives for completion. And waking up and doing that is for you, what getting in the car, showing up for Zoom, and staying a tad frightened all day so that I don’t miss a call from my boss is for me. All tense energy that most people use feigning diligence channeled towards developing something that is all about and could only have come from inside of you.
And, in my imagination, it’s not like being a musician, or a filmmaker, or any other creative who has to sit across desks from people in suits who hold all the cards, pretending that you don’t both know that you’re powerless, that you effectively begged for, and they hurriedly assented to, this fleeting window of time; avoiding all stifled indignity that would rise from acknowledging it.
No, for you, all is the rich and devastating process. Or, at worst, much more of the process than in any job. Even professional adventures as independent as running a food truck or fruit stand seem like they would have more or the ritual submission of admin and logistics. You, the lucky ‘Tuber, simply concretize some little zone of your ethereal essence, in the form of an animated education video or analysis of Parasite or whatever, upload it, and so long as the algorithm doesn’t disappear you into Kafkaland, you’re done. What’s for dinner?
I’m sure any full-time YouTuber not in my imagination could tell me how life is life, that they spend as many blurry days plugging tired thoughts into formulas as I do, that the time ratio of creative fever to searching for free stock footage is the same as the ratio of fun problem solving to sitting through mystery calls. That this is only the fantasy of a funemployed seeker who just discovered Egon Schiele.
But it seems possible – possible – that in big digital networks, we can dream up jobs made almost entirely of what psychologists say is the purest stuff of human well-being. And for an angry, aimless electorate, that would be very cool.