Anatomy of a Rut.

Watch YouTube Creator, Proceed to Question Life Decisions.

If you’re new here, this is Cinq Personnes, a snazzy blog from ex-YouTuber and Computer Science nerd Reece Martin about living better, learning, and sometimes getting unstuck from ruts. Please consider subscribing, it’s free!

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I think Cinq Personnes is at its best when I’m at my most authentic, and that means highlighting how socks made my life better and why I spend my money on toilets, but also when cool YouTubers make me feel inadequate, and how I get over it (at least how I hope I will). I think the idea of an influencer making you feel bad about yourself is extremely common, but also something that seems so obvious that nobody so sophisticated as to write a blog about life and wisdom would fall into it, but here I am; it happens to everyone.

I watch a decent amount of YouTube, and it’s definitely the main media I consume. The vast majority of the stuff I watch isn’t what I would describe as “lifestyle” content, instead it’s educational stuff from people like 3Blue1Brown, or travel stuff from people around the world, like Una Moto.

The street I used to live on. A nice little retail strip.

Recently, I’ve been put onto a YouTuber (who shall not be named), and I’m sort of jealous: they talk about city stuff like I used to, but also all kinds of other topics; they are also a pretty great photographer, and have an amazing apartment in a big metropolitan city, as well as ten other things that I see as aspirational. I don’t think they would describe their content as “lifestyle”, but their lifestyle definitely comes through in it.

The whole experience has made me even question my decision to retire from YouTube in mid-2024, and whether I’m really where I should be at this point in my life, and also “Why is (said metropolitan city) so nice?” (I addressed something like this before).

This has all the trademarks of a rut in the making, so I think it’s worth asking where I’m going wrong and how I can get out of it — It would make me immensely happy if you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation and this helps you get… unstuck.

It’s Not Real.

I want to start with the reminders on why YouTube content is an imperfect reflection of real life.

For one, and this is just obvious at this point because everyone is always saying it, but online videos or content is a highlight reel — it’s the best moments. People make videos, maybe ten or twenty minutes (on YouTube at least) each week, and in our minds instead of seeing that this is ten of the best minutes from this person’s week, we see it and go, “Holy s***, this person’s life is amazing!”. (It’s even easier to feel that way when sitting out in the suburbs cleaning applesauce off of your screaming kid’s face!). Probably a worthwhile thing to reflect on is that nowhere in these awesome videos of people exploring their city and living interesting lives are they moping about watching YouTube!

I was thinking of this on my almost daily walk (summer has been hot in Toronto, so hot that even a guy who did a walk the day his kid was born has been staying inside), and I think another dangerous thing we forget when we see influencer content is that it doesn’t respect time. It’s easy to watch five videos that take place over five years, and feel like this person has superpowers, when the reality is that you too can complete a lot and change in major ways in one year, much less five! Of course, you also don’t know how old an influencer is, and if you’re, say, 25, and this person is 37, it’s no surprise they’re ahead — they’ve been an adult for like three times as long!

It’s also sort of multiplicative when you see a person who you don’t know, doing amazing things in a city that isn’t yours. I talked about it before with New York and linked the post above, but it’s just so easy to romanticize a place which you rarely if ever have to confront the downsides of. With YouTube, what you see is sort of all you get, so it’s just so easy to fill in the gaps with stuff that feels as nice as a well-manicured ten-minute YouTube video.

There’s also an insight I have that most people do not, because I was a professional YouTuber, and that’s just that YouTube is asymmetric. It’s a lot of fun to sit down for twenty minutes to watch a video of attractive people doing aspirational things in aspirational places, it’s another story entirely making such a video. My favourite video I ever made was this one, and I did the entire thing myself end-to-end. It’s actually fairly fun to watch — and long at 40 minutes.

Making it was fun, at least in parts. But, honestly, it was no more fun than watching it back, and making it required like five hours of filming alone, then I needed to edit for hours more, write a script to read out, and other things I probably can’t even recall. My point is, even a video that I enjoyed making was not that much fun to make, and most videos I made were a lot less enjoyable than this one. I was less happy with the script, I wasn’t going on a fun adventure, and I had to stand in front of a camera and essentially public speak.

The point here is that not only is a video a media product designed to show you something specific and make you feel a certain way, but it’s not even often all that enjoyable to make that product. YouTube might be a cool job, but it’s still a job.

The idea of maybe doing YouTube again is still floating around my mind, and who knows — it may well still happen, but (as you should do before making a big decision) I’m going to take time to think about it. It’s easy to get drawn into something when you’re on the outside and can’t see everything, and it’s perhaps even easier when you know you did it before, and could do it again.

I’m going to do my best to remind myself why I stopped doing YouTube before I dive back into that, and yes, some of the reasons were self-imposed barriers to YouTube being fun that I don’t need to impose (reading the comments), but not all of them are.

Now, while I just talked at length at why I shouldn’t feel like I’m inadequate, or that my life is interesting enough, and also why YouTube content does not paint an accurate picture of the real world, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn here.

But, You Can Still Do Better.

For one, when you see something aspirational, you need to know when it’s something you should pursue — guy driving a BMW 150 kph down a highway with a racing kit on it... probably not! — guy getting a multi-thousand day Duolingo streak... maybe! If you see someone with a nice apartment you could sit and feel bad, or you could finally get that piece of furniture that you know would complete your space and make it more comfortable for you. To some extent, we can get in our own way, and you should at least be open to the idea that you’re doing that when you feel bad about the status quo.

One thing that is almost always sitting there is photography. I used to be a big photographer — I had a DSLR and would take all the photos for every family vacation. Honestly, most of the best photos I’ve ever taken were taken over a decade ago when I was a photo junkie, but when I moved for university I just sort of let that go. What I should do is pick up a camera, but then also bring it with me. So often in the past (like when I was doing YouTube) I had a camera, but didn’t want to bring it around, lest I break my main source of income, or find it inconvenient (maybe I should go APS-C!). To take good photos you need to have your camera. So here’s my commitment to you reader, when I get a chance I’m going to get a camera, put it in my bag, take some nice photos, and upgrade the rather “mid” smartphone photos I currently use for Cinq Personnes articles.

The point of all of this is that you can’t feel bad for not living up to a standard that is... impossible to live up to, but it is also worth considering if some of the things you see, you could actually do, and might be putting up barriers preventing yourself from doing.

Probably a big part of feeling the way I do — and that content of people going out and around their cities touches a nerve — is because as I already said I’m a bit stuck at home. Yes, I can take my kid around the city, but since they can’t walk at all, it’s really hard. Strollers are a pain of course (and they hate sitting in the stroller in anything but perfect circumstances), but being on the subway as your kid wails, and they can’t just tell you what they need is… stressful. What I really ought to do is try to get out more (recognizing that this requires the willpower to do so) when my partner is with our kid, so I can still have some of that time for my sanity, while at the same time remembering that going out exploring the city with my kid will eventually go from “this sucks” to “this is pretty amazing!”.

The last thing I am a little struck by, and which is unusual for me, was seeing how this creator kept old things around. My YouTube plaque never went up on my wall (I’ve never put much on the walls of my apartments, and they’ve never felt like mine — which may well be part of my problem when I see a nice lived-in apartment!), but this person had ones up from channels they weren’t even posting to anymore. I think a flaw in the way I operate in life is trying to put the past away when I don’t always need to. Sure, some things are painful and it’s probably normal to not want to remind yourself of those things, but I find myself keeping YouTube or University stuff out of view just because I want to feel like I’m no longer there and that I’m moving forward. “I don’t make YouTube videos, that’s not my identity anymore, why would I have things to remind me of that?” and I think the reason is because who you were does shape who you are today. That I was a YouTuber, and that I have degrees in Computer Science might not define my “career” today, but they certainly shape the way I live, the people I know, and the things I value. (I think part of my putting the past away is probably also because I thought being a YouTuber was cool, and studying a fancy subject in University was impressive, but being a dad … you know).

So, I think that’s the end of my little therapy session with all of you. I’ve been watching something, it’s made me feel a certain way, and I wanted to talk about it. Sometimes the things we watch make us feel bad for reasons that are not productive, but sometimes there are things we could be doing differently. I’m going to try to move forward in a constructive way, and I hope to update you down the line (and put prettier photos in my posts). For now thanks for reading, and make sure you’re subscribed!