The Reality of the Dream Job Scam

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Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Forroughout the two thousands to twenty ten s, right, a new blood entered the world of work. Millennials After growing up watching TV films like Fight Club, Office Space, the Office, Millennials had been traumatised, right? They didn't want to grow into that. They wanted to go to work and ping pong for an hour, take a slide down to the free food buffet. Th get a massage from the office masses. Who wants to be an executive insurance liaison Midle Maner when you could be a hot boy YouTuber? Maybe you don't want to be a media personality? Well, no problem. You could run a cool hip star. For this generation It really did feel like your childhood dream job was within grasp. but then Somet happened. You know, you'd get depressed, you'd get sad. you know, I'm miserable a lot of times. I have a mental breakdown every other week because I push myself so hard. Six day work week trend gains steam. The nine hundred ninetiney six culture may be taking root in the US. If you don't know what nine hundred n ninetine six is, that's when you work from nine AM to nine PM, six days a week. It really felt we were so close to changing So what happened? Where did the dream jobs go? The anxiety you're talking about and even like patches of depression which is crazy because like, b, I look around in my life es. If you go online and you read a couple of surveys and some articles, you might find out that your boy you're right here. I a YouTuber. Apparently I have a dream job. No, look, I'm gonna be serious. It's a good job. L I enjoy it. I do it because it was my dream job when I was a young gangster, you know, trapping out in the bits. and I wanted to put that gangster life behind me and turn into a full time f ing Youube I seeing how many blue foods I can eat in twenty four hours. This literally smells like a blue creamle. Whilst there's always been dream jobs, like my dad wanted to be a footballer, the difference is is that in the past, it didn't feel accessible. It didn't feel like you could realistically, you know, if you grew up in Wigan, I don't think they send people to space there.' say It's not likely going to be a national billding. But YouTube changed this, right? And it really began with one key individual, one weird Swedish kid. In Pewie Pie, we all watched him playing these games that again, there was clearly no budget that went into it. They were literally browser games on some shitty little camera in his bedroom. But what happened right is whilst we were watching him, no one really knew how much he was making. But then reports started coming out saying that he was making millions. and suddenly just like that, Pewdiepie had created the dream job. But I think there's two other people that are arguably More important, and that is Logan Paul and Jake Paul. Hey y'all, good morning, Logan. What's Barb Pul. Welcome home, Jake Paulish. And I wanna before we say anything else, I want to just analyze one video posted in twenty seventeen by Logan Paul called I bought Me a house. G, I'm also with the man and manager, manager Joob thousand dollars yesterday on Gucci cloth. Also, one of the rings I bought yesterday I lost, as you guys know. Lost at the premiere for my movie, King Bach's movie. The video starts and he tells us he's with his manager. He then tells us that he just spent twelve thousand dollars on Gucci. Also, he lost his favorite expensive ring. And bearing in mind, all of this has happened and we're one minute furty into the video We haven't even talked about the housees about to buy. but it's about two minutes where Logan does something I think is very, very, very important Logan turns to the camera. you, nine year old viewer. and he says This' just a boy from Ohio who moved to Los Angeles to pursue his dream. Wh didn't listen to the haters, Who didn't listen to the people who said you couldn't make money and actually make a career out of making videos on the internet. When you watch this and when you watch my vlogs in general, you guys get inspired and motivated and work hard so that one day you can buy a house for your wife, your friend You see, what Logan Paul and Jake Paul were doing was a kind of propaganda. R right? They were like the perfect salesman. I hope that YouTube, I know they awarded them, but I hope they understand just how much Logan did for them. They were selling the lifestyle of being a YouTuber, like they built their own brands around that. Picularly Logan, right? Logan had this additional gift. Not only he didn't give a single flying fuck about any social norm, but he wouldd also be able to do like these emotional diatribes where he would look at the camera and cry and say, Hi, I'm just a boy from Ohio to take a step back This is kind of fucked up what he's doing. You know, as an asslot watching YouTube, seeing him tell his story and witnessing part of the content was following his life improving. You could see it and how his life was getting better and he was earn a load of money. And when he's telling you you can do it too, I feel there's a sense that you might start believing him. I wanted it and I worked hard and I believed in myself and I kept pushing and pushing and pushing to make that happen liivving a life of my dream. If you believe in yourself, if you can expand your brain and think outside of the boxing you can do whatever the f you want, bro, be a maverick baby. And it's not just loogan, right? It was this whole wave of flex content creators, Rice gum, Tam ten, all of these lot. They were selling the lifestyle. They were propagandizing Be Youber And the thing that really stands out from in the past is how accessible it felt because many of these guys and girls, they grew up doing things that we did. You would see a lot of the guys who were playing, they were gamers and you would see them go from their parents' basement to becoming celebrities with mansions and their own gaming room and o my go, look how cool it is. they got Pokemon carpets and shit LEDs. In the past, whilst everyone always you Aspiration was always sold to people and people you know, they liked the idea of getting rich and famous. Everyone knew that to become a celebrity, you need to move to LA to Hollywood, you need to go to auditions, you need to get scouted. Youube change them compleplete It broke down the wall. It democratized fame. And now Gold Rush Have a me One my subscribers Oh my Godd. Oh my go. Okay, so whilst this is all happening on the platforms, you're seeing these young people go from rags to riches You have to also think about what was happening behind the scenes. The tech boom of the twenty ten s mirrors perfectly the story of these creators, right? It was the exact same thing. It was young people just like us, oh my god, Mark Zuckerberg wears hoodies. And they were like nerdy weirdos that went and made trillion dollar companies. You can see this passing of the torch from when you look at the top ten companies from nineteen ninety eight to twenty twenty five, right Back then it was all big oil and big phma and supermarkets. boring shit. oldld money, right? oldld money, nepotism, connections. you had to be in the know to get into there and we all saw that. But the big tech takeover Different man, it was I digital dudes del deep into the depths of their discovery. It was the same DIY feel. It was people who just stumbled into their positions, like Zuckerberg, I't know, rating Titsz or whatever he was doing. He was doing some weird shit and it popped off. It worked. And there was many similar stories of people who when you saw them in interviews explaining how they got rich, you were like, oh wow You are me. You have the same background as me and you invented the sox subscription service and now you're a triillionaire. That is the story of the two thousands to twenty ten s, right? It's this feeling of absolute cultural change as the old holders, the old gatekeepers pass the torch on. Obama, you know, he's a younger president. He's like forty seven years old. He grows off of the back of this online movement Facebook promotion and it feels like he is bringing about change. It's this belief that if we just get some young millennials in with their fucking dope top knots, they will fix everything. And if we are in charge, we can make a new world, a world that is fun, childlike where nothing bad ever happens again. And part of that mission was the belief that we could change Wor environment, the Grey Cubicles was just the perfect imagery to sell this system that was in charge sucked. So if we could just change that, then may be to fix the system. We didn't want cubicles, so we got IKEA kitchen tables instead. and I thought that kind of went along with our whole vibe here. stuff. There's some beer down there. Before we go any further with this video, I want to give a massive shout to today's sponsor, CyberghostVPN. If you spend as much time as I do on the internet, you might think that the incognito mode keeps you private. Unfortunately, that's not really how it works. Your internet service provider, your school or workplace network, even public wiifis can see a lot more of what you do than you might expect Whether you're browsing at home in a cafe, in an airport or hotel, your data exp And that is why I use CyberghostVPM. With just a couple of clicks, Cyberghost encrypts your connection and routes your traffic through secure servers in over one hundred countries, helping keep your online activity private and secure. 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That works out as just two dollars and three cents a month. you can try it completely risk free. Big thanks to Cybergoes VPN for sponsoring this video. Anyway, back to the video. So millennials come in, they kick down a door, gray cubicles Fuck off! Ping pong tables, pool tables, Xboxes everywhere, basasketball, fitness classes, office massage chairs, sleeping pods. all the young mlenies, they walk up to the gay the old grey man in the cubicles of his tie. What's that around your neck? Oh it's a tie guys. The tie is it? A tie? Yes, it's a workday, so I wear ties to work Oh, you must have missed the memo. You didn't get it through letter. It's Oesy D today. Yeah, maybe check your emails next time. Maybe if you guys could help me understand the emailing system, maybe what's interesting is there was theory behind this, right? The concept was called worker's play and it was this idea that if you could make work feel more fun, more playful, more childlike You know, sort of more like the college campuses that many of these tech workers had just spent their times out. If you could feel like that it could foster creativity and would be the solution to the concept of the alienation of labour. If you flick through some of the literature on it, it was like a direct response to trying to solve this that Marx had of capitalism a long time ago, that waged labor is alienating. It makes people feel distant from their friends, their families, their communities, the very work they're doing and the product of work at the end, they feel separate from it. and that alienation kills the soul. It kills your true human nature. Workers' play was seen as the solution. You would sometimes hear the phrase conscious capitalism. And all of this stuff that Google was doing was like super successful. It earned them the reputation of being like the best company on Earth to work for. We reported last week that Ftune Magazine is named Google, the best company to work for in America again. Welcome to the good life at Google. This campus in Mountainview, California offers employees comforts, privileges, and perks that workers at most other companies can only envy. People are getting swept up with these headlines and like, h, how cool it looks at Google and this is it, this is the future. You have to scratch a little bit of the surface to understand the deeper logic of what was happening You see, back in the two thousands and the twenty ten s, the software workers were a very rare, very valuable labor source. They came from these elite universities and they were very valuable in the labor market. So Google doing all you know the free gym classes, free foods, laundry at work, all of this stuff, it wasn't just because Google were nice. No, it's because Google saw that this talent of labor was extremely valuable and they were competing against Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and any of these many stps that were popping up that really wanted that talent. And so for them it was worth it. That extra money spent on all this bullshit. If it keeps them sweet, then so be it. Let's do it. And you hear this later on right? L Later down the line, Sundar Priti, the CEO of Google like to this day, he explains that free food wasn't just a perk of the job, but rather productivity and creativity driver. That detail is really important because to us it reveals a logic. They were not just being nice because they're nice people with new ideas of how work should be No They were trying to entice a labor force to work for them. These freebies were there to remove friction between the worker and work. It was a carrot on a stick. If they have to go out for food, they're away from work. If they need to sleep They're away from work. If they need to go and do laundry, they're away from work. If they can just do it all at the office, then they're always there. But you see, it couldn't last forever Health is looked after by on site medical staff, and luxury is provided by a company subsidized massage service cut salon, a lawn dret and dry cleaners. The list goes on In fact, rumour has it that team members bring their laundry in over the weekend to avoid having to use their own machines. You see, the low interest rates that allowed this lavish growth of the twenty ten s came to an end and suddenly investors started asking for profit, efficiency. And nothing would show this clearer than the twenty twenty two takeover of Twitter Elon Musk. Elon Musk has arrived at Twitter's San Francisco offices that Musk was telling potential equity investors in this deal that he would cut headcount by as much as seventy five percent. As I've reported, M morale is not great right now at Twitter. In twenty twenty two, Elon Musk buys Twitter. And when he does so, he walks into the office with a snink ' He wanted to say let it sink him And a sink has the word sink in it Elon Musk is ten years old. So he goes in and what he does is he basically says, you know all that cool fun shit ping pong Yeah fuckle that, right? It's over. It's work o'clock now. Elon comes in, he cuts off thousands of workers. He attacks people who are remote working so people working from home. they don't come back to the office, they're done, and whoever remained had to work extremely hard support long hours, high intensity, exceptional work standards. This moment is so important because it was a rupture moment in the world of big tech. The old, fun Google Slip and slide era was done. Meta so Facebook, literally a year later twenty twenty three came out with their yearar of efficiency, announcing roughly ten thousand more layoffs and closing around about five thousand roles. Google cut around twelve thousand roles in january twenty twenty three. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft Salesforce, and others also made major cuts during that same period And I've been joking about office Masuses, but they really had them and Google cut their jobs. F one, offffice Masusers were fired from Google rest in peace. two hundred sixty four thousand tech employees were laid off in twenty twenty three, followed by one hundred fifty two thousand in twenty twenty four, one hundred twenty four thousand in twenty twenty five. And like the competition that was happening that was causing this, you know, if Elon Musk and Twitter can handle half the workforce and still be profitable, so that places the pressure on everyone else to do the same all Shareholders start saying, Well, why can't we do the same? We make more money? That competition wasn't just coming from Silicon Valley, it was coming from abroad. Many Americans are enjoying a long holiday weekend, taking a break from their typical eight hour work days. Well in China, the government officially caps workers days at eight hours as well, or a maximum of forty four hours a week But a so called nine hundred ninety six schedule is pressuring some workers into twelve hour days, six days a week. In the early days of the gold rush, Silicon Valley in America dominated, but now China was coming up on the scene. And China has a workforce that demand much less than some hipster in San Francisco needs a macha latte and goat yoga classes, right? In China, they start bringing in what was called nine hundred ninetine six s The nine AM to nine PM six days a week are seventy hours of work. Like this has kind of been somewhat outlawed in China, but enforcement is patchy. Let's say it like that. What is happening here and I think this is really important for us to understand and this is the obvious mechanism that you'll see time and time again The labor force as more people poured in to want to do these jobs from all around the world, as technology enabled remote work outsourcing globally. and Google kept advertising how cool their job was, you know, We're the best company to work on earth. And so everyone wants to try and get into the tech sector. You have fuck loads of people training for it, suddenly Sarce rare labour force in the early days They're no longer that scarce. And where in the past you had to put a carrot on the stick, you had to do all the ping pong tables and shit. Now, if you need a fucking ping pong table, I'm sorry, mate. If someone is willing to do it cheaper, hungrier and with less matcho latte, they become very attractive to the employer. And so the labor force loses its ability to negotiate with the capitalists with the employer. The employer is now in the powerful position. They hold the cards. And AI just adds another pressure to all of this,. AI is coming along and they're saying, well, we can automate lots of your jobs. Maybe we don't need to hire as many people, right? It just adds another tool where they can make the feeling of this workforce feel like the floor underneath them is not stable. They need to be more competitive. They need to put more hours in. Ultimately The millennials, the hipsters and their revolution, conscious capitalism, workkers play, the dream. Sadly, it dies. Mark Zuckerberg turns into an evil villain. Google takes down the sign that says donon't be evil. The guy who owns Brow Dog is a prick and social media is destroying the world. At the end of the day, the dream of a conscious capitalism was just Capitalism All themong Now we see the stock market reacted quite favorably to this round of layoffs. We see these record stock prices for a lot of these tech companies. The investors really favored profitability, really favored this lean year that these tech companies had. And so instead of rewarding the growth that we saw and that them all pursue years ago, they're now rewarding profit. So whst this was all happening to the workers of the tech platforms, building the tech platforms. at the same exact time, the same exact thing was starting to happen to the workers O the platform. So I'm going to say somewhere around like twenty fifteen to maybe I would even go as far as like twenty twenty two. You kept seeing these numerous stories of like young person with some talent, some skill who becomes like a viral sensation. they make a dick load of money and they buy mansions and cool fast cars. We see thatner inspires me like crazy. nineteen years old owns a YouTube empire. A nineteen ninety C four Corvete. Drive this? I've literally driven it one time. So this is like a pitbike track. I guess that's really what it is, but there's like a little pond down there. We have like a little go cart down there. You could just like rip around. But Th then on Instagram, you were seeing something it slightly different, which was often people that came from money. So like Kim Kardashian, Dan BillZarian, selling this sort of Instagram lifestyle. Im sure there was probably some people who came from nothing that made some money and did this. But Instagram was sometimes a little bit faker because it was more people who had money that were showing their rich lifestyle. And then from there they ended up making more money from brandles. So these as I say, they were doing what I mentioned before, they were advertising being a dope influencer. Wow, look, you can just take a picture of your avocado and eggs and get millions of pounds. Sign me the fuck up. I saw my friend Peter buy a jumper that I was wearing once, because I wore it and he complimented it, I think I have the ability to influence thought So this creates a gold rush. Thousands, trillions, brigillions of young people go, okay, I want to make it as a hot boy influencer. And so what that does in the same way the tech sector did with the tech workers is it creates more competition. But then not only is there more competition by the sheer amounts of people trying to make it, there also becomes competition from different platforms. TikTok comes along and sort of fucks the game up. What they do is they take the concept of being an influencer, which is in the past, you did some cool videos, got some traction and you got a following, your videos would get shown to your subscribers. TikTok's algorithm works purely on aggressive monitoring of engagement signals. How long you watched it for? it tracks likes, it tracks did you save it? Did you send it to a friend? Did you have a conversation from it? Does it start a conversation in the comments? They make these hyper specific profiles of viewers and only show them the stauff that gets the most juice out of their fucking brain when they're watching it. TikTok makes it so that every single video you make has to be A bager, no exceptions. Basically having a following doesn't really guarantee you much stability anymore. So TikTok starts just popping people off. Like I think I set up a Tikok. I think I was contacted to make a TikTok channel backack when I was doing Parkore videos. I posted a few videos and got like twenty thousand followers. In the early days, it was giving people followers. And that was doing something psychological. It was getting people hooked to the feeling of going viral What is also happening is something internally known as heating, which is individual TikTok advance employees Selecting certain videos and intervening to make sure that they get a specific number of views. The algorithm deliberately on fresh new pages will occasionally give you a viral hit. If a video is good, it will just go, ah, fuck it, let you go viral. And then that gets you in on the treadmill. You start thinking, oh, fuck I could maybe turn this in, I could get loads of followers and make a load of money. Somehow, I don't know how But apparently, influencers are rich. Aarently, they all have fast cars and mansions. TikTok sort of rides off of the back of the influencers that had been created on YouTube and Instagram. There's almost like a sort of like cultural capital that has come from the word influencer. So TikTok can give the illusion of that, right? You might have a million followers on TikTok and make like a couple hundred a month if that. And so if that's the way it is, if you're a professional content creator and no longer does your following really matter and every single post is judged independently. Fundamentally The job changes at that point. Inreasingly, you're just competing against like this algorithmic recommendation system where you're only as good as your last post. And as soon as TikTok started doing that and started eating the lunch of Instagram and YouTube, those platforms just copied TikTok. They went fuck, we have to do the same. So I kid you not, People with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of followers would see their posts just die. they would flop, losing out to this sea of like new competition. and you're now in this sort of like rat race where you have to put so much effort into making content. Like these lot end up working just as much as any normal job for much, much less than they did maybe five years ago. All of this is to say that the exact same process that happened to the tech workers who built the platform The same has happened to the creators on the platform. I think all these influencers are lying about being rich. I've almost had a million followers broke ro Well, not broke but I go to my regular minimum wage job every single day, five days a week, clock in. That's how I pay all of my bills. Is that my thing. I did my taxes and I only got three brand deals this year, each for two thousand dollars, which works out to like five hundred extra dollars a month. Amazing, gorgeous. I can never be happier, but I'm just saying five hundred dollars a month is not livable. And I think just these influencers are lying to you I think because they're either trying to sell you a course or tell you how great their life is, there's nothing up here. I'm up here now with everybody else and I'm telling you that there is nothing up here There' a term called cultural flattening, right? This is where if you're an actor or if you're a singer, if you're a skater, you have to put your art out via TikTok. And in order to succeed, you have to format it in the way that works on TikTok. So you have to look at trends, you have to look at metas and basically copy them package your art in that medium and often people present it in a way that they know is proven to work on TikTok. Like every video needs some kind of hook, there needs to be some twist. And so things start looking the same. And this is really interesting, right? Because it changes the dynamic of what a professional creative person is meant to do. Traditionally, like the whole point of becoming a professional creator is that you're able to dedicate one hundred percent of your time to your craft so that you can make Better art. In the past, what these platforms allowed when it was more focused on your follower account and they would show your posts to your followers is the followers worked as a kind of like safety net. You know, you had a few successes, some absolute bangers and that built your general audience, now you can post off and not everything needs to be a banger. Maybe some posts are average. you try something new, it doesn't work, it flops, but it doesn't matter because you have a certain baseline and a certain level of stability. and then eventually after all that experimentation, you have a banger. You do something really good That dynamic allows artists to be more original, more unique and innovative. However, what this algorithmic competition does by meaning that your followers mean nothing and every post has to sort of perform independently, is it flips the dynamic on the head whereby the established content creators who are meant to be the professionals who are meant to innovate, they actually are incentivized by the platform to become more creatively conservative. If you take too much creative risk and it bombs and you have a bunch of bombers, then you stop getting brand deals. and then you stop making money and then you have to quit. So your incentive is to always stay afloat. And what's the best way of staying afloat Just do what works. And I can't help but think that this is why everywhere we look in art, we just see endless repeats remakes, reboots. I think this is why. Be everything has to be a banger now. You can't just have a mid piece of content. And this is where the cultural flattening happens You mention here, which I think is a good example of it and part of What you ruminate on is this generic coffee shop. Tell me about that. Yeah, it was this kind of coffee shop design that I started encountering. There's white subway tile on the wall, there's reclaimed wood furniture. There's hanging addison bulbs with those like exposed wires.. There's succulents and little ceramic jars. There's a giant neon sign that says I love coffee.bsolutely Avocado toast and script or whatever. The reason why you find those everywhere, like whether you're in Beijing or Berlin or Los Angeles or Bali or wherever you go is because our tastes have kind of been homogenized by platforms like Instagram So there's like a particular aesthetic that works for Instagram and everyone puts it out there. and then everyone else on the platform slowly copies that. And I think that's true for a coffee shop owner, but it's also true of musicians or a chef making a kind of food that looks good on Instagram, or a producer making a beat for TikTok. M is may suck for creators us as cultural consumers, for the platform itself, it is fucking great. They have all of the power. If you fucking complain if you don't like it, millions of other people are ready to jump on your spot and take it. And these new creators they'll work harder for less money, even if they thought in the early days that they were getting the dream job where you do your passion, it's great, you get a house, you get the fast car. But increasingly that is becoming harder and harder to attain from this. The reality doesn't matter because the illusion is the point, selling the dream And I think what's interesting to me as someone who's been in this a while, I think we're seeing a new frontier open up with the world of streaming. They are the ones who are holding like the whole world's attention, like IShow spepeed, Jimkin, Hassan. And because there's sort of fewer of them, it means that all of the attention is on them. And because all the attention is on them, they have a lot of power and they're able to get massive brand deals and make a shitload of money again advertise how cool this life must be. But I believe, you know, having seen this dynamic a few times, over time, more and more competition comes in, more and more people are fighting for their spot. Eventually their power too will diminish. And I think realistically, if we're being honest, right, if we're talking about dream jobs, I've always seen streaming as like Not that. to me it does not look like a dream job. To really make it, you have to stream from what I've seen anyway, like eight plus hours a day. That's eight hours a day. And I'm telling you, man, being on camera is tiring. And like when you think of, I don't know, Clavicular and like HS Tiki Tky and all these people, they don't look like they really living the dream. They're ha to be they look stressful. they don't look happy. They're not really doing fun things. They have to get they have to be more attention grabbing, more extreme, They have to get into conflicts into fights, they do things that risk their own lives sometimes, all because the attention economy is becoming so brutal that you have to be more and more insane just to stand out. And so why I say all this is because it gets me to a point where you look at the modern landscape of creators and like tech workers and it starts to bring in the question like What the fuck is the dream job anymore? Is there this escape route? Is there a job that you get that is just fun, happy, you make a load of money and you can escape the rat race? Does it exist anymore decided that I will be no longer be doing sidemen videos Somewhere along the way, I started losing the balance of my own life. I found it hard to make enough time for myself I found a hard I definitely found it hard to find time for my family I find it hard to make time for the people I love and I realized that something has to change. Here's the truth for kiddos. I'm gonna be honest As a YouTuber, a dream job haver, there is no dream job There never was. That's the whole fucking scam That's the whole point. I think Justin Bieber is a really good example, right? Because he was a young guy who posted a few times to YouTube, got scouted and became an icon. And I think it's fair to say at this point. No one looks at Justin Bieber and goes, wow, what a dream life he has. No, you can see the guy's troubble. And seeing the wild ride that his life went on and just seeing how like fame and all this money distorts people. They don't know who to trust. they don't have any real friends because everyone's trying to make something from it. It's a miserable life. And the thing is We know that. These lives of fame and fortune are always tied with the other side, which is depression Aiction and loneliness. We've known that forever. We've known that with rappers that died young. I watched Johnny Cash's bio pic the other day. Everyone knows this story. And yet, like the recent ones has been these giant YouTubers who grew up off that golden era that we all thought was the dream going on to podcast and saying that they are depressed. Past three years, there's been so many different times like where I was like depressed and figuring shit out that I got in bad ruts. L I have thought patterns that I get in bad habits with and maybe I was trying ress people or maybe I had all these other people that had some sort of monetary gain from my life telling me certain things like, this isn't gonna last or we gott to do this or let's keep doing this or work with this company and all this. And then it became too much for my young mind. L let other I really just let other people's thoughts dictate my life. I think that's when I needed drugs to make answers for that To me, it just feels like where we're at right now in the world is that Every aspect of the modern economy has become so competitive. Less and less jobs are able to earn you a solid living now, and there's so much competition to get those few jobs that exist. I think it has got to a point where yeah, this sort of myth of the dream job, like the escape route, I think it's started to vanish. I don't think that people really believe it exists anymore. I'll be honest, I love my job as a YouTuber. I do it because I'm passionate about it. I do believe that somehow some wayay I'm making some kind of difference to some people or something like that. But I can't fucking sugarcoat it. It's a hard job Like it's not what I saw. cie pied in. And not just that, it's like it's the way The feeling of gaining your dream job changes over time. The come up is incredibly exciting. Every YouTube will tell you this. first hundred K feels like you're winning the lottery. You feel on top of the world. It's incredible. It's a completely novel new feeling. But then give it a year, two years and you've had your up and then you've had some downs and then some ups and downs, that feeling It kind of goes, right? It does eventually it becomes a job, a job that is ery competitive. There's no feeling at least at my level of like true stability. like I can chill out a little bit. I don't need to go so hard. And I know how it sounds. I know this sounds like a wor with me. I don't mean it like that. My job is great. I am very happy with it. But I think I have a responsibility as someone who has achieved the dream job that they wanted to just demystify it a little bit. I think those videos from Logan Paul, Jake Paul and stuff like that, I think they did a disservice the reality of making content and I think it led a lot of people on a journey that was kind of a bit of a false promise. But this is the deeper point, right, is I think with any job, whether it's a creative job, a media job, or if it is like an office job or start up a business, offtten we trade our sleep, our relationships, our health, our community, our connection to our family, to chase careers. And I think that's why so many people are so unhappy when they make it, right? Those really big creators, I think they suffer from it the most because in order to get to such a height where you're a multi millionaire, you run this empire, you misster Beast, youve got the chocolate barsre doing all the shit, what you had to give up to get there is a lot. It's very easy in moments like that to go fuck I'm like a zoo animal. Like I don't have free will. I'm like a little robot to my businesses. And sometimes those emotions take over and you just gott to control your thoughts and be like, well, this is the life I chose. is you want success. You want to change the world, You want to do this and this. This is the price you have to pay. But no, I don't think most people would be happy living my life. Oh let's just grab a couple million dollars happy. Are you happy? This year probably so far more unhappy than happy It's just, there're just things you gott to do that just aren't fun Material success is great when it buys you stability. That is what people are like briving for is the feeling that they don't have to worry again. They don't have to worry about will they be able to get a house, pay bills, they hate that feeling is awful, worrying about the stress of money. But once that part of your material needs are taken care of, in order to feel happy, you need a community that you're close to, that you feel valued among You need friends, you need hobbies, you need a job that yeah fulfills you creatively, but that's not the beal. And the sad thing is is that our modern economy has made this nearly fucking impossible for almost anyone. Like how many of us had to leave our hometown and our communities and move to a big city to chase a career in order to survive And then that meant you saw your family less, you saw your friends, you've moved away from all your friends. And meanwhile, we're still all tired and we're still all stressed about the future. Dream jobs don't disappear because people don't want creative, fulfilling, meaningful fun work to do. Dream jobs disappear because capitalism finds a way to take things that we love, turn it into a competitive market and then squeeze the joy out If we are ever to get what we are seeking truly deep down, we need to get rid of this current ideology that is just dominating Western culture. The pressure on us all to keep making more and more money, we need to measure population by how much free time they have, how happy they say they are, how healthy they are, how strong and connected our communities are. We need to support a politics and politicians who want to change how we perceive What a successful, healthy country is. We must not let the system starve us out. We must not let the concentration of wealth force us into serfdom. We are going to use the tools at our ours. We are going to reclaim the wealth we have created. and we're going to build a world where we work because we want to, not because we have to. We will become the architects of the post scarcity economy the victims of it. We will establish our role in society rather than allow corporations to demand we work for it Before you go, don't forget to check out Cyberghost VPN. usings the link in the description or the pin comment. You get eighty four percent off four months for free and a forty five day money back guarantee. A super easy way to protect your privacy online. Ifether you're browsing on public wifi, streaming content from different countries, following the worldorld Cup, Cyberghost has you covered. 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