PlusHeart Issue #17 - Consuming for fun vs consuming for work
How do they mix? How do they eat your soul when you realize that you can't enjoy things anymore?
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When I started PlusHeart, I wanted to avoid the issues getting too personal, or end up just another diary; I wanted it to be focused and restrictive, mostly because that’s what I felt I “should be writing.”
I don’t think that’s working anymore, and that’s fine — it actually sets up this week’s issue quite nicely, because it’s about the perception that you need to do something in a certain way to be successful.
I started blogging when I was 16, and that meant having a really bad idea of what it would take to “go pro” at a profession that I thought I wanted. You end up looking at what you think is success, and work backwards: you ask “what do I need to do, to get there?”
This “working backwards” ends up creating a content consumption habit, and that concept is something that I think needs to be examined a little more thoroughly. If someone isn’t prepared to separate their personal, “for fun” content with consuming content that they feel will aid their career, the boundaries clash in really weird ways.
It's a paradox: you need to be able to both consume like a fan, but also process like a professional. The latter seeks the authenticity of the former, but because "what you're using it for" is eating in the back of your brain, it keeps the feeling from being authentic.
For instance, if you want to be a movie writer, do you have the luxury of avoiding the Marvel Cinematic Universe? If you really, really dislike it, can you say “I don’t want to have to force myself to watch something that I will end up not enjoying?”
Unfortunately, the answer that I’d like to give — the one that says “yeah, mental health first” — clashes with the practicality of what it takes to be successful in the current fucked-up landscape of content. Even if you hate the MCU, you probably need the context of how it’s affected moviegoers, fandom, and filmmaking habits.
It’s too big to ignore, especially if you don't have an audience. And that can feel depressing, isolating, and draining.
One of my favourite YouTube channels, RedLetterMedia, has this problem often. They got their start doing early-2000s snark criticism of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films, and exploded in popularity doing the same thing for Star Wars prequels.
Despite having educated commentary, RLM’s audience doesn’t always recognize that the style of these videos were meant to be partial parodies of an overly-invested super-fan. As they grew, their videos became more subtle. Instead of riding out that one character, they started making modern movie reviews, playing exaggerated versions of themselves.
In the mid 2010s, they released a few videos that I think expressed the catharsis that nerds were looking for: by tearing into Ghostbusters (2016), Zack Snyder’s DC movies, and the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they validated their audience’s cynicism.
Eventually, though, their videos for “big brand franchise” movies had an expectation attached to them: the audience says "tear them apart, make us laugh, make us feel correct for hating that normies took over 'our stuff.'"
It must’ve been a conscious choice not to indulge that: part of the reason I enjoy RLM is that I don’t feel like they pander to what their audience expects them to say. Lately, viewers asked about when a The Batman (2022) review was going to come out, and it became almost a running joke.
The tease of "what we thought about The Batman" was dropped in a ton in other videos, but they haven’t released anything dedicated (as of publish), almost out of spite.
R: “Oh my god, we’re here. We’re here in the void. That must mean a major tentpole release has come up."
M: "We’re talking about Jurassic Park: Dominion-[corrects himself] Jurassic World: Dominion. Did we see that yet?"
J: "Yeah, we saw it. It came out. It was okay, but not very good."
M: "Okay, we’ve done our review of Jurassic World: Dominion."
— Rich Evans, Mike Stoklasa, and Jay Bauman, Obi-Wan Kenobi: Episodes 1-4 - re:View
Regardless of how they feel about it, they still need to watch those movies; even if they are sticking to their principles, those principles still involve consumption because their value involves expertise (alongside entertainment). While you'll hear them say "Ehhh I tried watching it but couldn't stand it, but you [co-host] said we're making a video about it", that's the "job" part of it calling.
Where I bring this back around is thinking about the creators of today who, like me, are not able to separate their personal and their professional needs.
As I talked about last issue, the “content creator dream” represents a freedom, source of validation, and an idealized career where work doesn’t feel like work. As with that previous issue, I didn’t want to just hammer home this as something naïve or shortsighted:
I don’t think that this career path is very easily researched. It’s similar to other entertainment jobs (like acting or being a musician) because there are endless variables and non-replicable situations that lead to success. This also includes a lack of mentorship resources, or the volatility of a mentor saying “I’m successful, but things are really different now.”
When someone’s starting out and finding themselves not fitting into a trend, they are unlikely to be able to influence a potential new trend based on their lack of clout. This point might just be optional, because I've been seeing a lot of creators "doing it for the love", and ironically these are the people most likely to blow up. However, that factors into the next point, because...
A creator’s mental health and ability to internalize what people say are the most important things (the ability to set boundaries, “don’t focus on the numbers”, etc) aren’t consistent. A creator faces a constant, intense reflection of how they, themselves are interacting with the job; a feeling of failure or “not fitting in” can be taken extremely personally, especially when dealing with the conflict of “not feeling like your taste is enough.” For the person who "never expected success", they can approach the project without anxiety, and be pleasantly surprised with the results; I feel like it's important to emphasize that that isn't every creator.
I'm interested in the next step of the question, which, ironically, I can't answer (yet): when left to your own devices, where do you end up?
For myself, I know that I both need to expand my boundaries and learn how to do it in a healthy way. I know I need to figure out where my goals are, then compare them to where I can't compromise on my principles. I need to accept that I can't manufacture success by "thinking about it and planning, very hard", and I can't force myself to create in a process that's impossible for me.
What motivated this newsletter, though, was the thought of someone who "learned to consume" in the same way I did, and maybe didn't have the ability to self-correct. Even if they moved on from the "content dream", they still would have this reflex telling themselves that they needed to "be productive with [their] entertainment," which would feel right, but would ultimately be useless for what they were doing with their lives.
Terrifying.
Housekeeping
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Image credit: ph.galtri