2k Subs & 2 hours Screen-time

My YouTube Subscriber count rolled over 2,000 the other week. It’s taken me 2 years.

I think that’s why it wasn’t such a big deal; my channel has been growing pretty organically at best. I concede; my thumbnails aren’t crazy enough, my titles aren’t grabbing everyone and my video concepts lack the prior planning and scripting required to make a video go ‘boom’… I accepted a while back that I wasn’t going to be the next Casey Neistat.

My YouTube Journey

I’ve been on a growth journey with content creation, particularly in understanding my ‘why’, and my deep motivations for vlogging physical challenges, travel, bike rides and runs. I’d love to tell you that it’s 100% intrinsic, that it was always about me being able to express myself. There’s naturally some degree of extrinsic motivations in all pursuits of self-progression and I’d be naive to say that I hadn’t fallen victim to this in the past. Showing others what I could do has been a big motivator for me because I came from a place where I felt I wasn’t achieving a whole lot, where I thought others had written me off, where maybe I’d even written myself off from achieving things I wanted to achieve.

I’m so glad I started YouTubing, because it was terrifying and it brought growth. I was scared of what people would think about me, the views they’d have about how I came across, whether I knew enough about bloody Triathlon! What I’ve learnt is that generally no one really gives a sh*t and on the off-chance someone does have something negative to say, you can’t control that. So I broke through the fear and started having some fun with it, the slower I grew, the more I realised this is all about me and the very few people that regularly tune in and leave lovely comments.

It took me a while to get there though. To describe it as peaks and troughs would be a gross understatement; sometimes you get off your head on dopamine when a video pops, often you are faced with the depletion and depression on a video flopping hard before questioning why you’re doing it all. Ultimately though, if you do it long enough to realise that there are people on that journey with you and shouting you along from the sidelines, you might learn that - whilst it’s certainly not the be all and end all - it’s a lot of fun and worth the toil.

Wrestling with the ‘why’ of content creation

If your ‘why’ becomes lost, you’ll question everything and probably give up. Before landing my dream job in 2023, YouTube, content and sports were my outlet and a much bigger part of my identity. It’s very easy to romanticise about riding a bike all day for a living, and Instagram will show you a bunch of people that are doing it. In fact it’ll show you lots more who are absolutely shredded, stacked, run 1000kms a week, own business, properties, drive nice cars, materialism, regurgitation, repetition, the same content, lots of it. It’s worrying, it’s politics, it’s capitalism, robots and war. It’s too much, and it’s social media! If I create content then I need to be seen amongst that noise, right? Maybe it’s about shouting louder, or doing more…

It’s too easy to be lost, influenced, downhearted and downright depressed with the volume of divisive and shallow content that will claw its way into our precious little minds. Content consumed often sits with us for longer than we’d like, affecting the next conversation we have, the next meeting, or dinner with our loved ones. I realised social media was getting me down, but I’ve stepped away from it before. Then, I made a conscious decision to come back and start posting again, yoyo’ing in and out of a flux state of social media induced de ja vu until my latest episode of conceding; this is all a bit cooked.

Finding my ‘why’

Stepping out of the glitz, the comparisons and the results of social media was where I was able to remind myself of why I should be be YouTubing; to inspire people to have a crack, to be a community builder, to bring people together, to advocate for events and different sports, to have new experiences, to be creative and to tell stories. What’s the basis of all of those activities? Well, it’s being outdoors, healthy, connected to others, purposeful, and proud.

Those things are everything to me! I expect they are critical for a long and happy life, and they are absolutely key to my sanity. I experienced all of the above through sport and movement, and I want others to feel those things too. And there you have it; there’s the ‘why’, behind my creative outputs.

What my focus is now and why screen time matters

Now, what’s not conducive to experiencing all of those things? Yes, you guessed it, and yes, we are going full circle; staring at your effing phone! It’s the thing showing us our dreams playing out in front of us (digitally), and yet it’s blocking us from getting there in reality. When I started to face the facts about my phone and time online having a detrimental effect, it became a matter of starting to address it with intention. For me, it was reading a couple of very important books on the way to work instead of scrolling (the first of which was Stolen Focus by Johann Hari), reconfiguring my phone settings, and installing apps such as Freedom. More reading (that fuels more writing), is starting to really reinforce the positive outcomes of all of these micro actions. Movement outdoors has always been there, and that’s Foundational.

Whilst it is an ongoing battle (and one that I intend to win), I am consistently under the 3 hour a day mark and more recently closer to 2, to the point where (in same week I hit 2,000 subscribers) I went under 2 hours a day weekly average of screen time for the first time since records began! This achievement brought great pride and hope, and it also gave me perspective.

The reminder that both achievements surface (2k subs and 2 hrs screen time) is that, ultimately, the things that positively affect our lives and general phsyce are right in-front of us. For me they don’t happen to be digitally-dopamine filled, notoriety or perceived and metric success. They are people, they are experiences, community, nature, challenge, growth, adventure… I think you get the jist. It’s time to tune back in to some more natural patterns, read a sh*t ton of books, write more, (still YouTube) and spend as much time as possible with people who care about me. But not just spend time with them, be present for every second; show I care for them so much, not wasting a minute while I’m at it. More to come on this.