YouTube is Taking Over My Life

Let's be real here, making YouTube videos is hard. Without a proper camera and vlogging style that isn't just "soooo umm hey," they usually suck. I've made a few videos with like 5 views and friends who say "your vlogs are....different."

And so we resort to the written word. But do you know what isn't hard?

Watching YouTube videos.

And do you know how many YouTube videos are on the internet?

My brain just exploded.

My obsession started in 2007 when my stepbrother showed me this video:

Mainly, being a teenage (fan)girl at the time, I just watched it over and over because I tended to get enormous crushes on people whom I'd never met. But as I finally got tired of the chipmunk voice, I'd just search for Harry Potter interviews and squeal over Daniel Radcliffe, like a normal person.

But now. I literally have more channels in my subscriptions box than I have papers that I've written in the history of forever. Because the thing is, once you subscribe to a person, you may think you're just going to enjoy their weekly vlogs and be done with it. But then they bring guests onto their channel, and--gasp--that person has a YouTube channel too! One that also links to a second daily vlog channel and shows all the likes and comments that person has, which guide you to the YouTuber your former favorite YouTuber has been watching.

Like, one of the refreshing things about Jenna Marbles is that she's isolated herself from the YouTube community. I mean, sure she had some cameos in Hannah Hart's videos, and she attends VidCon because she's a breathing human being, but we can often count on Jenna going solo in her videos and her lack of comments on other channels makes for lack of evenings that get sucked up by following her every move (unless you're girl crushing and staring at pictures of her on google images...what?).

But once you hit other vloggers, you've unlocked only a tiny portion of the vlogging community. It's like one big-ass family tree that you're trying to put together one cinnamon challenge at a time. Even if you think you're escaping from the vlogging world, you see comments like "Tyler brought me here." Which then brings you to Joey Graceffa and the ever popular debate on his sexuality. But then you realize, oh wait, back in the day, Joey and Luke were really tight, which brings you to Miss Glamorazzi's makeup tutorials you've been sneakily watching when you want to impress your friends with the smokey eye look--only then do you realize that Nerdfighter Kristina Horner ALSO dated Luke, which means you have to catch up on all the Nerfighteria videos, which means you must watch all 2 kajillion VlogBrothers videos.

And then it's 4:00 in the morning and your coworkers wonder why the bags under your eyes are getting increasingly prominent.

While there are far more perks from YouTube then there are television, I'll admit this: if you discover a new show you enjoy on TV, you watch it, grab some popcorn, laugh and cry a little, then wait for next week's episode to air. But on the internet, it's likely that you'll run into a Vlogger who already has like 100 videos, all of which you can't. stop. watching.

When it gets to the point where you think you have a friendship with people you've never actually spoken to, you know something's gone a little crazy.

At least my addictive personality brought me to something that won't send me to prison. So hey, that's a plus.

Namaste.