the DUMBEST thing 99% of depressed people do

So I was watching the “Modern Wisdom” podcast episode with Hamza on it.

(The one that Hamza gets schooled on.)

Hamza’s telling Chris Williamson, the host, how he used to make all those hyper-edited “Jeffrey vs Adonis” videos.

And that he stopped because they were doing more harm than good.

You know, they just fucked up everyone’s attention spans, spiking their dopamine with goofy animations or a “BOOM” sound effect every 3 seconds.

Now you might expect Chris Williamson, a podcast host, to start glazing him for this.

“oh yes, long form content is so much better, you’re such a good person, yo- (chokes on tip)”

But instead, he said something that I wasn’t expecting at all:

“That’s a good story”.

"But if they don’t watch you, they are watching Mr Beast. And Mr Beast is going to continue to play that dopamine game.”

“I agree that fully pushing the dopamine button isn’t a great idea.”

“But if that’s 7 minutes they spend learning about themselves, or meditation, I don’t think that’s a disservice.”

“It’s a good story, but I’d spend some time fact-checking it to see just how true that was for yourself.”

At first, to me this just sounded like waffle.

But when I really sat down and reflected on this, I realised just how true this was.

We all tell ourselves stories about the past. Sometimes these stories may be correct, sometimes they might not.

The problem is, if you tell yourself a story about the past that isn’t true, over and over again, eventually you just start to accept that as a fact.

And that can f*ck you up real bad.

For the last few months, my channel has kind of plateaued and stopped growing. And recently, I had been beating myself up about it.

“You just can’t stay focussed on one thing, why did you try freelancing, why did you do shorts, you just can’t stay consistent, you’re such a f*cking idiot”

But yesterday, whilst I was journaling about this, that jacked intellectual ghost from Newcastle popped into my head again, saying “that’s a nice story”.

And I realised I had been lying to myself.

It’s not that I was some retard who couldn’t stay consistent to save his life. That’s just the story I was telling myself.

I remember sitting down a few months ago and realising that I wasn’t actually that good at anything. So I made the executive decision to fully commit myself to studying for my A level exams.

I knew my channel would slow down. But that was the price I was willing to pay.

Because I could either be an average YouTuber and an average student, or I could choose to be exceptional at one thing.

I couldn’t have them both.

And now I’ve completed my mission of getting perfect A* grades at school, I can fully focus on YouTube and become exceptional at this too.

We all lie to ourselves. A lot.

Maybe you tell yourself that you’re just “an awkward person” or “bad at Maths”.

Or maybe it’s just that you haven’t had enough experience talking to people yet, or you weren’t prepared for this particular test.

Be careful which story you choose.

It will save you a lot of self-hatred, and might just change the course of your life.

Speak soon,

Yvan

P.S. gonna be reviving my channel soon, stay tuned for some bangers coming up 👀