#workaholism
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So a bit of personal behind-the-scenes blogging here about YouTube sponsorships, doing creative writing for a job, workloads and stress and burnout.
I am never taking this many sponsorships ever again.
I don't know if there was something in the water in September or if a bunch of marketing budgets just needed to get burned, but at the end of August I started getting a lot more emails than usual from agencies that wanted to purchase sponsorship integrations. I'm sure there's some structural industry-side reason for this that I'm simply not privy to, but from my perspective it was just a flood of emails.
There were the usual ones, of course, the RAID: Shadow Legends sponsorship that I am getting very tired of turning down over and over again, a bit of crypto-nonsense and Play2Earn games which can go get f*d, and then a smattering of things that just kinda don't fit my channel or my audience, like a Chinese-run site doing online coding classes for people who want to emigrate and work in the PRC, or one of those semi-fraudulent "purchase a square foot of land in Scotland and become a Lord, technically!" which are, like, usually just a harmless novelty, but not really fit for my audience.
The way influencer marketing on YouTube works (at least at my level of micro-celebrity) is that companies will contract marketing agencies to run campaigns for them. The agencies bid against each other for contracts, promising to deliver maximum engagement at minimal cost. The company picks an agency and gives them a pile of money to spend on ad-buys. Agencies reach out to influencers en masse (usually through mailing lists and directories of channels above a certain size, listing their general content and likely audience profiles), and ask us how much we charge for a 30-60 second integration.
The marketing agency's objective is to make their budget deliver as many trackable metrics for their client as possible, usually in the form of signups, clicks, website traffic and so on. Some agencies will focus on advertising only with huge names that have massive reach, some will pick out a hundred smaller creators hoping to cast a wider net. Most agencies will do some mix of the two.
So, they email me like "how much for an integration?" and I... have to invent an answer. See, there isn't really a standard rate for any of this. How much is a view on my channel worth? How much return on investment does an ad on my channel generate? I'm just a person, I don't have a market research department, I don't have any education or training in evaluating the effectiveness of advertising. I make video essays about game characters and occasional anime.
The best resource for YouTubers on this subject is... each other. We basically just have to talk to one another, figure out what everyone is charging and try and derive a reasonable rate from that. There isn't a union or a guild, there are no associations or central resources (or even community resources) that set the standards or allow us some form of collective bargaining.
My problem is that most of the peers I talk to don't really do influencer marketing. They stick with ad revenue and Patreon/Twitch subscriptions, or just aren't on the radar of advertisers yet, so I'm flying this one kinda by the seat of my pants.
Ayway, returning to the subject. In September I get a lot more inquiries about sponsorship than usual, which puts me in the very unusual position of turning sponsors down not because their product is a bad fit, or a crypto scam, or RAID: Shadow Legends, but because I simply can't make enough videos fast enough to fill the "order."
I book Squarespace and Skillshare, which are reputable companies whose products I've used myself, which basically fills out my schedule, and then the offers keep coming. I should not have accepted as many as I did.
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I should say, I've never been poor. I come from a middle class family in a Scandinavian social democracy, there are safety nets under me that most people don't get to have, and I don't ever have to really be afraid of ending up on the street or starving. What I have been is broke. I used to make my living as a commission artist and cartoonist, and spent essentially a decade constantly, constantly dancing right on the very edge of being able to make rent each month. I was chasing a dream of building up a customer base to fund my independent comics work, and... it broke me a little bit. I came down with a very dark depression that I couldn't really deal with, and spent weeks and weeks pulling all-nighters chasing commissions and doing work trying to scratch money together.
YouTube happened entirely by accident, and for all that I've complained about the troubles that come with this work, might have genuinely saved my life a little bit.
I bring this up to say, ever since the YouTube gig started reliably paying my bills, I have had at least a couple of realizations per year of just how anxious and freaked out I still get about money. I still check my online bank obsessively, I still fret over keeping savings and paying bills, I still feel guilt over spending money on non-essentials.
And when I get too many sponsorship offers, I still feel like I should accept all of them, and pull whatever all-nighters it takes to fulfil them, even though I'm not 24 any more and when I tried to do it as a 24 year old it caused a depression that nearly made me suicidal.
Because what if these are the last sponsorships I'll ever get? What if the next sixth months are really bad months and I don't make as much in ad revenue? What if my videos lose steam and the audience moves on? What if everyone gets tired of me? What if someone copyright strikes my channel twelve times out of nowhere and kills it forever?
I haven't been broke in years now. I'm not a wealthy man, but I haven't been broke. I don't have a pension fund, but my bills are paid, and looking rationally at the statistics and analytics I have access to, there is literally no reason to believe it'll all go "poof!" and be gone overnight.
And yet, I feel so guilty about not taking every sponsorship I can ethically take. I feel so guilty about not hoarding money, building savings, protecting myself, "being responsible." And I feel so afraid of that unnamed catastrophe lurking just around the corner, where I'll be punished for my hubris to think that I was ever safe, and thrown right back into that fearful scramble. Right back into that depression.
It's a sticky fear. You scrub and scrub and scrub, and the stain of it just won't come out.
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I took too many sponsorships in the latter half of this year. This is a champagne problem, there are creatives I know who would kill to get sponsorships at all, and I'm not trying to fish for too much sympathy here. "Oh no, too many people wanted to give you money to read 60 second ads, boo hoo YouTube man, how sad for you" is, like, a valid response to this. I'm not exactly being ground down by the Amazon Fulfilment Center over here. It's not a cry for help, or a plea for support, it's just a blog.
But I took too many sponsorships. I clogged my schedule, and committed myself to a lot of work, and... every other part of my life suffered. I found it harder and harder to spend time with my family, because the next deadline was always on my mind. That knowledge that taking time to do anything else inevitably means a harder rush to finish the work, it means more stress and less space to think, less space to do good work.
Because that's the other anxiety, of course. Having taken these sponsorships, I now feel pretty intensely that I need to make videos that are good enough that my audience doesn't feel taken advantage of, that they feel that the content I put behind the ad was worth the time they took to sit through it. Sponsored videos need to be better, they need to have higher production quality, better scripts, better editing.
So how do you justify taking time to do anything else?
I spent less time with my family, I became less and less able to keep the apartment clean, less and less able to cook, less and less able to even spend time socializing and doing enrichment for my pet rats, which they need for their mental health. And I started to feel the familiar sensation of burnout eating me up from the chest outwards.
I had started taking piano lessons at the local community center, something I've wanted to do for myself for a decade. And I had to cancel those lessons over and over again, and usually last minute, because work just got in the way. Last week I told my teacher that I simply wouldn't be able to make it to them anymore, to cancel the whole thing. And that knocked the wind out of me more than I thought, honestly. That was something I had been so excited to finally do for myself, and it just got bled out in front of me by the workload I couldn't get myself to say no to.
I've dealt with burnout many times before. I know what it is, I know how to recover from it. But I have never learned to stop inflicting it on myself. I am a workaholic, I am addicted to the stress of this sh**, not because I find it pleasurable, but because for ten years the satisfaction of finishing a piece of work and securing the paycheck was the only sense of real relief and catharsis I ever got to feel from my anxiety, and I don't know how to stop chasing that high. When I'm stressed, when I'm anxious, when I'm feeling unsure or unmoored, the only response I know is to drown myself in work. Energy drinks and junk food and too little sleep. I don't have any other real coping mechanisms.
It'll take... a while to fix those things, I think. It's not happening right now. But I am promising myself this, at least: I am never taking this many sponsorships ever again.
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The Step-Zero-Problem
Sometimes when trying to climb out of a mental health hole and seeking advice or giving other people advice on how to climb out of a mental health hole, the advice just plain won't work.
Which is frustrating! Especially if it seems like good advice (and it even might be!)! And personally, I think sometimes the problem isn't even necessarily that it's the wrong advice, sometimes the problem is that it's secretly Step Five and not Step Zero.
To give an example:
"Write down your emotions three times a day" is, generally, good advice when you want to figure out what's up with you over a longer period of time (e.g. to figure out if your emotions change with your menstruation cycle if you have one. If certain people or situations tend to provoke the same reactions in you, stuff like that).
But what goes unexamined is that to do that, you need to understand your emotions to begin with. You need to have the courage to feel your emotions. You need the scheduling ability and executive function to put down words reliably. So you would have to learn what lack of skill keeps you from that first. Putting your emotions into a diary is like, Step 3, not Step 0.
At some point I recognized I had anxiety and workaholism (shout-out to past me sitting in the waiting room for my psychologist's office whom I visited for guidance on how to relax and spending every moment doing flash cards on calculus, a subject I did not study and seeing nothing wrong with that). And my solution wasn't "recognize your self-worth as a person isn't tied to your productivity", it was more like...
recognize your bf stops working at some point of the day, unlike you -> start having a pause at the end of the day because you want to spend time with bf -> oh wow I'm slightly less anxious -> now that I am less anxious I'm realizing how anxious I am, this sucks -> hm, is what I'm doing actually an effective use of my time? I haven't been that successful for how much work I put in -> wait, if I want to be successful to be happy but sacrifice my happiness right now but success won't guarantee happiness... -> okay maybe it's okay if I don't work as hard as I do...?
... spread out over multiple years. I am now able to better disconnect my self-worth form my productivity, but it's like, step 20 (and still ongoing, btw).
Mental health is a skill made up of many smaller skills. To some these skills come easily, to others it doesn't, some people have a deeper hole than others to climb out of and some people are actively getting pelted by rocks while they do it.
I'm not sure how to solve it because it's a problem that only becomes apparent retrospectively. Still, I think going "okay, but is this even Step Zero for me?" could be a worthwhile thing to ask.
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The Hollywood Reporter Roundtable Analysis
It was very intriguing for me how Oscar carefully delved into the question he was given by the host Lacey in 38:45, but in a slight surface-level way. Some information he's given in other times filled up a lot of the blanks he left behind in his answer.
First let's go over what they said.
Lacey: Your co-star from Scenes From a Marriage, Jessica Chastain, talked about [how] she had to go to a place that was so dark, and she's not sure she can sort of ever go to these places as an actress again. And I'm curious if you've felt any of that and how your individual, personal sort of boundaries shift with time, with experience, with success.
Oscar: You know, before I'd be like: "what limb do I have to take—cut off to make this scene three percent better?" But I think that it's about inspiration. [...] The whole reason process exists is to inspire, right? And sometimes you don't need a wild process to be inspired by something. Sometimes the words themselves will do it, um, sometimes the character is enough. Sometimes the situation is so harrowing that that's enough to inspire a whole history of a character. And sometimes you gotta: "what did he eat for breakfast? why did he do this?" In order to try, y'know, to inspire some imagination and some sense of truth, right, or some sense of—some emotional, interesting thing.
Oscar [continued]: But boundaries, I think, are becoming more important to me now. And then you have kids. Time is the most valuable commodity. And I think with Scenes From a Marriage, the scenes themselves—that [was what was] so harrowing, not so much the character. But also it mirrored a lot of things in my own life. [...] I'd be reading a bed time story to the young actress that's a five-year-old with a little bunny lamp, and then go home, arrive just in time to sit in the bed with the same exact bunny lamp, somehow, and read a story to my five-year-old— You know, it just starts to fuck with your head, because we're just a human being, so that's a weird situation! [...]
Oscar [yeah he makes up for not talking for almost the entire hour with this question]: After a while, I think it was just all the nature of it, you know? It was right in the height of the pandemic. It was in this factory in the Bronx that had been turned into a studio. It was only like sixty people. And these were very long—almost every shot was like a thirty-minute take. It felt like a weird hybrid between theatre and TV and film. And with someone that I've known for twenty years as well—so all those things created a very uncanny situation, that I think, going back, I probably would have been a little more mindful about. Like, y'know, a little clearer boundaries— And the truth is, even if it wouldn't have been quite as real or good (you know?), I'm okay with—I'm getting better with that idea that—I don't have to cut off a limb just to make it slightly better. It's okay. It's okay.
First off, i just wanna gush over his speech patterns bc I am that all over the place when I try to communicate my thoughts (i actually skipped a lot of his endearing stutters, pet phrases, and filler things he said to grasp at his next message). It's so relatable especially in a group full of people (not to mention legendary actors), because even a guy who looks as confident as him can still sound like he's making a discovery as he speaks and takes you along.
Now on to my analysis of what he said because at first I didn't completely get what he meant!
I have a feeling he's very perfectionistic, and from how he speaks about work in other articles as well as here, he also seems a workaholic. I believe in here he's trying to say that there should be different levels of immersion and hard work to connect with or explore the character instead of always bringing his all and beyond to the job.
Also, scenes from a marriage was as traumatic an experience to film as it was for us to watch (his words after 1:56 on this vid), and Jessica admitted to crying every day for four months during filming. It was a very intimate and emotionally intense series to film especially with such a close friend from Juilliard. So i believe both Oscar and Jessica gave everything they had to make this already overwhelming series feel as real and painful as possible. And since it's a hard setting to feel far removed from (both are married, have kids, have a sex life, could be facing divorce in the future bc of its high rates), it must have hit them even harder. I believe it's not truly an experience to watch sfam without you screaming at, insulting, or feeling immensely sorrowful for the characters because THAT is the reaction they fought hard to get from you. That pain, that anxiety, that tension, that rage, that pity, every emotion you felt that you could barely cope with? All crafted thanks to their extremely immersive and talented performance coupled with their flawless chemistry. But if it feels real to us, through a screen…for them it must've felt even more so. Unbearably more so.
So i believe these experiences, as well as having a family to take care of, and other priorities like time and mental health, have recently made it more important for him to strike a balance in his life. To stop obsessing over creating the perfect role or immersion, or to use these roles to cope with and process real life struggles (as he's admitted to do). I think it's important for him to now connect with real life more, like being a father and a husband, as well as just a human being. Not just an actor or a character.
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Important Excerpts from Articles about escapism and coping through acting (in case you don't feel like reading the last references):
New York Times: After His Mother’s Death, Oscar Isaac Turns to Shakespeare for Solace
“I didn’t know how to process any of this, but this [performing as Hamlet] I knew how to do.”
But [Hamlet is] also a tragedy that asks Mr. Isaac to relive the anguished death of a parent at every performance. In Sam Gold’s rowdy, deconstructionist staging, every time Mr. Isaac mud-wrestles, or lofts a prop skull or performs a mad scene in just a T-shirt and briefs, he seems to be working through his own loss, transforming raw private grief into riveting public performance.
As Mr. Isaac explained, performing has always helped him come to terms with his emotions. “This is how I’m able to function,” he said. “The only way that I’m really able to process stuff is through reflecting it.”
Esquire: The Dream of Oscar Isaac
To be in conversation with Oscar Isaac, who is forty-three, is to talk with someone who has thought deeply about the course of his life—not out of narcissism or vanity but by necessity, a desperate desire to find what feels like solid ground. For him. For his family. For us, whom his art reaches. He has worked to wrest meaning out of his confusions and fears. His effort is ongoing, and his audiences have the privilege of following him in his relentless and shattering performances, in search of the firm footing he lost every time another of his dreams was interrupted.
If superheroes have their capes and their flamethrowers to help them survive, we ordinary humans have our imagination. It has been our shelter for millennia, a way to express and to understand what feels incomprehensible. When it all gets too heavy, sometimes the fragile rope tethering us to solid ground snaps clean, and there is often no refuge sturdy enough to put us back together except in the intimate, private shelter of our minds.
NPR: For Oscar Isaac, life — and acting — is all about impermanence
“It [acting] is a funnel, and it's always been where I go to understand things about life and things that are happening to me. But it's one thing to grieve as a character and one thing to grieve as an actual person. And I think that there's still quite a lot of unresolved stuff there.”
I hope you enjoyed this post! I had to organize all my thoughts in one place because it's so fascinating and complex
#oscar isaac#oscar isaac hernandez estrada#the hollywood reporter#actors roundtable#the dream of oscar isaac#new york times#esquire#maaza mengiste#scenes from a marriage analysis#scenes from a marriage 2021#scenes from a marriage#sfam#long post.#perfectionism#workaholism#oscar isaac roles#oscar isaac analysis#oscar isaac meta#long post
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I work so hard because whenever I stop I start thinking about you and that I cant stop.
#wolf#love poem#poetryinmotion#poetryporn#forbiden love#longing#heartache#workaholic#workaholism#moonchild#moon#enemies to friends trope#enemies to friends to lovers#strangers#strangers to lovers#me and who#us#confession
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"Conversations with Dad"
I've been able to go on this journey with my dad recently (in the form of conversations with each other through comics, about things we couldn't talk about before) and I'm sharing it as we go, for anyone who can't talk to their dad.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to boost my patreon and commission orders. Help me spread the word to anyone you think might be interested, and thank you so much for supporting my work! You can also just follow on Patreon FREE for all the updates and random downloads I put up there:
PATREON patreon.com/kimchicuddles
COMMISSIONS TikvaWolf.com/services
BOOKS TikvaWolf.com/books
DONATE venmo.com/tikvawolf
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Anybody else feel extra guilty when not working themselves to the bone? 😅
#workaholism#why tf does relaxing feel like wasting time?#anxiety sky high tryna selfcare like bish wha?
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After having worked myself to the bone and crashed this year, I'm learning to embrace my needs as an autistic person instead of treating myself like a productivity machine. It's been a difficult lesson to learn, and it still makes me nervous, but, like... I *can't* do 3 hours of productivity each evening - on top of holding down a full-time job - without everything kind of... falling apart. Any that's okay!
I'm also learning to embrace how I need more solitude and quiet time than most, and how much I enjoy that. I've always been a bit of a hermit, but now I'm using that for more than just a means to push myself harder. To try to find ways to connect the work for me.
I've spent most of my adulthood with the messaging that everything has to be a hustle. Unlearning that, learning to accept that I need to respect my limits, ranks among the most difficult things I've done.
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Yesterday's therapy session
There was a lot of talk about how I need to balance work and self-care because I've been working so much and neglecting myself, in the sense that I don't go outside at all for days in a row, I don't cook proper meals and I take very little time to myself every day, I just put work above everything else and when I don't work I feel guilty about it.
And then I had to admit the hard stuff. That deep down I like being swamped with work because it makes me feel useful, like there is a purpose to me. That I'm not very good at taking care of myself even when I don't work at all, so at the very least this gives me a very good excuse for my neglect. That I'm scared to let up the pressure because I don't trust myself to keep the balance and I'm afraid that if I take a day to myself, I will lose focus and stop working as hard. That it's better to feel like shit about work than the rest of me. If I let work take over, I don't get to feel a lot of other things except tired and occasionally angry. I don't have time to look at myself and feel sad.
And now I will box all these worrying revelations about myself right up and start working because there is just so much to do.
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Work
Daily writing promptJot down the first thing that comes to your mind.View all responses
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is to how I will be able to enjoy this nice weather right now that is just around the corner while I am working since I will be working a lot more now that some changes at work will take place. For most people working certain hours they rarely ever enjoy anything such…
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#Business#dailyprompt#dailyprompt-1913#Economics#Organizational Behavior#Retail#Work#Work Issues#Workaholism#Workplace Issues
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Week 28 - WA Serenities
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I sighed up for more work that I won't get paid for. God when will capitalism end.
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timothy’s jokes don’t always land
#‘is he texting his boyfriend’ WRONG he’s reading his work emails#17 yr old ceo activities#i could never be a tim drake kinnie i am the opposite of a workaholic#my art#batfam#batfam fanart#batfamily#batfamily fanart#batman#batman comics#tim drake#tim drake fanart#red robin#red robin fanart#damian wayne#damian wayne fanart#damian al ghul#damian al ghul fanart
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I Will Give You Rest (Exodus 33:7-23)
Sometimes, we must get away from it all for a while, so that we can rest and gain some fresh perspective on life and who’s really in charge of everything.
Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp some distance away, calling it the “tent of meeting.” Anyone inquiring of the Lord would go to the tent of meeting outside the camp. And whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people rose and stood at the entrances to their tents, watching Moses until he entered the tent. As Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud would come…
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#exodus#exodus 33#god&039;s glory#god&039;s presence#moses#needs#rest#sabbath#sabbath rest#spiritual health#spiritual life#spiritual need#spirituality#workaholism
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WCHB Chapter 5
Chapter 5 is out!
TW: Unhealthy coping mechanisms (Workaholism, implied alcoholism), Graphic suicide
#wchb#what could have been if only in our dreams#unhealthy coping mechanisms#workaholism#alcoholism#tw: suicide
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Impulse’s bed in his Scarland office vs his bed in his actual base
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Lemon Pepper Rotisserie Chicken and Poor Man’s Mac & Cheese
Hello, all, I feel as if I’m letting out an exasperated breath from being dunked underwater, only being allowed to raise my head every now and again for the purposes of getting words out. This is a blog post coming to you live from my new condo. I made it, at least it feels like I’ve finally achieved some kind of success.
There’s problems, here and there, everything seems to want a bite out of my paycheck and the maturity thrust upon me in my new workplace leaves a lot to be desired, more on that later, maybe, maybe not.
First, some chitchat. I moved into my new condo and got my PC set up almost as soon as possible, I knew that as soon as I had an idea for a post, I’d rack them up like a professional billiards-player. Or pool, if you’re from the Midwest, like me. Does Illinois count? Did you pronounce it right in your head?
I guess at it’s core, it doesn’t matter. I’m smoking drugs that actually get me high and I’ve never been happier. I’m distracting myself from my mortality well, and trying my best to tune the world out, and only focus on a single thing at a time. The thing is, though... I’ve been biting off more than I can chew.
Despite the many food-related adages of this post, I’m writing it because I’m feeling a little trashy, still a little sick from my last post, I’m constantly nasal and going to sleep with one nostril perpetually-clogged. This is hell.
However, the heaven of my freedom is being bogged down by my workaholism. One of my greatest heroes says that workaholics don’t like identifying as workaholics because they think the word ‘workaholic’ means ‘productive’. I sustained the same habitual pitfall in my own daily life. I take on more work than I’m comfortable with in my new job, I’m moving out of my parents’ house faster than I’m emotionally comfortable.
I’m coming up with new ideas for different series and shows, left and right, along with little itty-bitty blog-posts like this to keep my brain doing jumping-jacks or whatever it feels like it has to do in order to make dopamine, anymore, in order to feel like it belongs, whatever helps it sleep at night, I guess.
I’m almost done whining, I promise. It makes me wonder, sometimes, how much of this is performance, or how much of this really is me just... thinking into paper. I’d like to think it’s 100% but some part of me probably filters at least some things out. I’m tired, overworked, underpaid, a little physically exhausted, and hungry.
I made my roommate dinner. I’d picked up a nice, fully-cooked rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, today, and combined it with what I call Poor Man’s Mac. It’s effectively generic-brand microwavable Mac & Cheese, seasoned lightly with salt and pepper. The trick is to add only about 1/2 - 3/4 of the bag of cheese-powder, since that stuff can be murderous to the dish, at large. It’s sitting, prepared for him in the refrigerator that we share.
I think that about does it for a meaningful-enough update. I don’t feel like exploring anything too deep right now, since I’m considerably lower on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs than needing to be self-actualized, or emotionally-consoled. So without further ado, I bid you, adieu, mi amigos.
Voy a ver Abbott Elementary. Abbott Elementary me gusta.
#writing#update#consciousness#living life#new house#new condo#new me#new year#maslow's hierarchy of needs#blog post#maslow's hierarchy of blogging#eating#food#cheap food#food diary#roommate#freedom#workaholism#tags#abbott elementary#eat#dinner#tv
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