When Visibility Becomes Performance | Burnout, Content Creation, and Devotion

And I think one of the most spiritually exhausting things about being online right now is realizing how quickly visibility can start asking you to stop being human, or at least stop being complicated.

Because I had all of these plans.

I was gonna stay consistent with YouTube Shorts.

I was going to post more regularly.

I was gonna finally, quote, do it right.

I had researched, planned content ideas, worked on my hooks.

I even had different title structures I wanted to test.

I started studying what kinds of thumbnails people clicked on, what kinds of phrases held attention longer, what kind of pacing performed better.

And at first, it was actually exciting, not only because I love to learn about new things, but because for a long time, I really did feel invisible outside of my day one ride or die listeners.

I would spend hours recording and editing episodes that were deeply personal to me and then watch them basically disappear into silence.

So when things started improving after I optimized everything, it felt really validating.

Like maybe I wasn't failing after all, I just needed to understand the system better.

But somewhere in the middle of all of that, the process started changing the way I related to my own work.

Because even though I was technically using clips from my real episodes, I could feel myself slowly shifting into a more calculated mindset.

So I stopped thinking about moments in terms of emotional depth and instead started thinking, would this hold attention fast enough? Would this perform well enough? Would this make someone stop scrolling? And I don't think I realized how much that was affecting me until my nervous system started reacting to all of it.

The filming, the editing, the pressure to constantly create, the watching analytics to see what worked and what didn't, the trying to make cover images that fit what YouTube wants, the trying to think ahead of the algorithm all the time.

It wasn't me.

pretty.

And I think that made it harder.

I think what made it harder was that none of it was technically fake.

And I think one of the most spiritually exhausting things about being online right now is realizing how quickly visibility can start asking you to stop being human, or at least stop being complicated.

Because I had all of these plans.

I was gonna stay consistent with YouTube Shorts.

I was going to post more regularly.

I was gonna finally, quote, do it right.

I had researched, planned content ideas, worked on my hooks.

I even had different title structures I wanted to test.

I started studying what kinds of thumbnails people clicked on, what kinds of phrases held attention longer, what kind of pacing performed better.

And at first, it was actually exciting, not only because I love to learn about new things, but because for a long time, I really did feel invisible outside of my day one ride or die listeners.

I would spend hours recording and editing episodes that were deeply personal to me and then watch them basically disappear into silence.

So when things started improving after I optimized everything, it felt really validating.

Like maybe I wasn't failing after all, I just needed to understand the system better.

But somewhere in the middle of all of that, the process started changing the way I related to my own work.

Because even though I was technically using clips from my real episodes, I could feel myself slowly shifting into a more calculated mindset.

So I stopped thinking about moments in terms of emotional depth and instead started thinking, would this hold attention fast enough? Would this perform well enough? Would this make someone stop scrolling? And I don't think I realized how much that was affecting me until my nervous system started reacting to all of it.

The filming, the editing, the pressure to constantly create, the watching analytics to see what worked and what didn't, the trying to make cover images that fit what YouTube wants, the trying to think ahead of the algorithm all the time.

It wasn't me.

pretty.

And I think that made it harder.

I think what made it harder was that none of it was technically fake.