August Update: Unanticipated (Patreon)

Hey team! Welcome to September.

Ambivalence

The new video went up on Monday and is doing well. Surprisingly so, actually; it got more views in two days than the Kentucky Route Zero video got in two months. Due to the subject matter, YouTube has gone and age-restricted it, which I'm pretty sure kills whatever algorithmic momentum it had, but it's still going strong. And the response is very positive! The Far Right dinguses have (so far) left it alone, so, for the first time in ages, a video that's been online for several days still has a kind and wholesome comment section! I'm still kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop and for a batch of bearded white men to make response videos with seven ad breaks, but, for now, everyone is being incredibly nice to me.

So of course I feel weird about it.

While the video is pointedly oblique about my life, and even states plainly that I don't want people to invest in me as a person, this is still my most personal video by far. One reason the video is as funny as it is is because taking even this tiny baby step into confessional YouTubery was nerve-wracking, and I had to find ways of entertaining myself just to get through the edit. So to release something I'm so nervous about and have it do significantly better numbers and have an overwhelmingly kind and wholesome response?

It's intoxicating.

It feels good. And the more I think about how good it feels, the more uneasy that makes me. Like, these kind and wholesome comments are talking a lot more about me than about the actual subject(s) of the video.

To me, this is a video about how the Right reacts to polyamory, how their choice of insults reveal their fears and obsessions, how deeply-embedded hierarchical thinking is both in their minds and in society, the racial underpinnings of popular conservative terms, and the irreconcilable tension between romanticizing both the Stone Age and the Enlightenment. My experience of people calling me a cuck for money was the thing that tied it all together, made it entertaining, and purged some thoughts I'd had buzzing around my brain for a while. But, while I think that all comes through, most people seem to be reading those themes as supplemental to a kind of... coming out video.

Which is (to me) strange. Again, while it's not something I've talked about on my channel because my work is deliberately non-autobiographical, I've never been "closeted" in my polyamory. Honestly, polyamory is such a normal, no-big-deal part of my life that the language of "coming out" feels comically hyperbolic, though I know it can be way more fraught for other folks. But I've got all these people thanking me for the positive poly representation and feeling seen and validated, and, while I'm happy for them, it's not what I was going for and not what I expected.

In short: this response is waaaaaaaay more parasocial than anything I've ever made. I put a tiny bit more of myself into a video and people are eating it up. The number of people saying "I know this is entirely parasocial but I totally wanna get a beer with you now" is nonzero, and not just hypothetically! People are legit inviting me to get beers with them when the pandemic ends. And I'm like, if you know it's parasocial... why are you still inviting me for beers? We're not actually friends! You don't even know if I drink beer!

I always conceptually understood what Contrapoints was talking about when she said she let her subs and followers replace her in-person community, but I get it on an emotional level now. This many people caring about you is overwhelming, and it feels, at times, fantastic. I feel loved. But... I'm not. People love an idea of me; they don't love a real person. And I'm the guy who made This Is Phil Fish, and watched multiple friends get cast out by their communities because what would normally read as a disappointing decision by a content creator now feels, to their fans, like a betrayal from a trusted friend. And that makes me want to run for the hills.

I guess this is a longwinded way of saying: I'm proud of the video, I'm glad people like it, if you've sent me a kind message or comment I appreciate it...

...and, for my own sake, I probably won't make something like this again.

The Work/Life Teeter-Totter

Anyway!

I've been fiddling with my work-life balance this past month. For the first couple months of the pandemic, I couldn't accomplish anything. Then I managed to get back to work once I shifted on what kind of work I'd be doing. I found that this was doable basically because I wasn't doing anything else; I only had so much bandwidth and, if I devoted all of it to work, I could make videos. This eventually meant a lot of other tasks and responsibilities falling by the wayside; for years I've been keeping track of my tasks in a dayplanner, but I found I'd completely stopped looking at it. And, after the 20th-or-so non-YouTube task that I completely flaked on, I decided it was time to try something else.

So I finally started using a calendar app on my phone, because I'm certainly not gonna go days without looking at that thing. It goes ding before important events happen and has a convenient task list where I can check things off as I complete them. And it's working great! I've been able to keep track of all the other bullshit I need to keep track of.

But then there's a new problem: I'm still on limited bandwidth. The reason I was able to work was precisely because I was ignoring everything else. Once I started being a responsible adult, there was suddenly a lot less time to work. And it sucks! Because, before this fucking pandemic, where there's a piece of news about the ways my country has utterly fucked itself every 12 hours, I could do both! Not always perfectly, usually a little late or a little slapdash, but I at least kind of kept on top of my pile. And now... there just isn't enough of me to go around. I'm sure many of you are dealing with similar problems; the world is exhausting and trying to manage burnout is, itself, a second job.

So I wanna try something starting this month. At the beginning of August, I did something unprecedented: I took a week off. After I finished my contribution to Ragnar's video (which should go public in a few days), I did no work for 7 days. I spent time with loved ones and ate good food and played games and read a book in a hammock and called friends I can't visit... and it was great. I needed that.

So I'm making it part of my schedule.

It's a long while since "put out a video every Monday" was the plan (and it never was that successful), so we're going to make the target two videos per month. And the schedule is gonna be: 12 days for the first video, 12 for the second, and then 7 days off. Bumping video turnaround time up from a week to a week and a half gives me more room to keep on top of other tasks, and having a mini-vacation at the end of every month will help me decompress and stave off burnout. Who knows, maybe it'll free up time to work on those passion projects I keep fantasizing about, though let's not be too optimistic.

I hope this doesn't come off as rude; I know a lot of you are similarly stressed and don't have the luxury of radically altering your schedules on the fly. But, well... if you could, I hope you would, too. You deserve it. And I hope you're finding something that works for you. All we can do is our best under shitty conditions.

That's in for me this month, folks. Schools are reopening this month, which is a terrible idea but it's hard to predict how terrible. I hope you and yours are safe. Take care of yourselves and each other.

-I