What it’s like being a “Philosophy YouTuber”

Three things I don’t see people talk about

I am, at present, doing alright on Youtube. This can change at any moment, but for the time being it is going relatively well. People seem to be enjoying the videos, and the number of death threats is still in single digits (and even then seem a little confused in spirit - one suggested that I had “offended his philosophic sensibilities”, which as motives for murder go is rather quaint).

This has also happened rather quickly (which, again, I am not complaining about in the slightest). This time last year I had just crossed 100k subscribers, now I am at 680k and counting. Frankly I am astonished that so many people want to listen to my rather dry musings of various philosophy books I’ve been reading, but I am nonetheless also incredibly grateful.

Something I often get asked is “what is it like being a YouTuber”, and as there are lots of videos emphasising that yes, it is a lot of work (though it’s hardly being sent down a mine), and yes, it is a little bit like offering up morsels of your thought to a vast eldritch God, I thought I would just go through three strange things I noticed from doing Youtube that I haven’t seen many people talk about.

The first is that you become altogether over-familiar with your own face. I have noticed things about myself that I had gone years without spotting. There is quite a prominent chip in my left incisor, which I got from being hit in the face, when I was at primary school after saying something I thought was very clever to someone much bigger than me (in hindsightI probably deserved it). I had gone years without this crossing my mind in the slightest. It had drifted into unconsciousness as just another totally commonplace part of the image staring back at me every morning in my bathroom mirror. But when a lot of your job involves either filming yourself or looking at yourself in an editing software, and you behold your own visage in startling 4k, suddenly these things leap out to you. Your face takes on this ever-so-slightly ‘uncanny valley’ feel, as if someone had replaced you with an identical clone but rearranged all your pores, and moved your eyes a millimetre further apart. It’s not particularly unpleasant, just incredibly strange. Having spoken to a few other Youtubers, I know I am not the only one who has had this experience, and yet I’ve almost never seen it talked about. Probably because it is totally trivial. Luckily I have a video editor so I don’t spend quite so much time in the pose of a 21st century Narcissus with tech-neck, but it genuinely made me quite self-conscious for a while.

In a similar vein, you get used to the feeling of being watched. It is very difficult to describe this sensation, but it’s a little bit like convincing yourself you are in The Truman Show, even though you’re definitely not and there is no evidence that you are. Admittedly, this might be a me thing. I have always been bizarrely neurotic about the idea that people were watching me without me noticing, which is why I like Kafka and rooms without windows. But it takes on a strange reality when you genuinely are being watched on social media. This is especially the case when there are videos you’ve posted that you would probably write differently now, but are still floating around the ether, like a younger, dumber version of you showing you up (I know full well this is how I will perceive present-day me in 6 months). You get a little into the habit of thinking about yourself in the third person, and of policing yourself even when there is no need to. I once spoke to another Youtuber who had recurring dreams about accidentally cutting down disparate clips of himself from various videos to make it look like he was saying a racial slur. I suffer far more from this in live settings, where I am perennially nervous. Whenever I am interviewed, there is almost always a little voice at the back of my head wondering if, in between talking about Nietzsche or propositional logic, I have somehow managed to weave in an inadvertent insult about the host’s mum. I am not entirely sure what the long-term effects might be of this weird disembodied perspective, but I’ll keep you informed. Again, it is not that this is particularly unpleasant, just odd.

Lastly, this strange gulf begins to emerge between your actual abilities and what people perceive you to be capable of. I do not mean this to be particularly self-deprecating, but as a thinker goes, I am nothing special. I was a pretty middle-of-the-road undergraduate, a pretty middle-of-the-road masters student, and I would describe my general philosophical knowledge as “moderate to fair”. Again, I’m not fishing for compliments here - this is a pretty honest appraisal of my skills, and I am not unhappy with them at all. I’m 25, still have inordinate amounts to learn, and am far more student than teacher.

This gives me a little bit of cause for concern. I am very fortunate, in the sense that an awful lot of people say very nice things about me in my comments section. I quite regularly have people comment positively about my intelligence, the quality of my research, or the clarity of my presentation. All of this is absolutely lovely, and I am very grateful for it. However, there are two concerns I have going forward:

1. This may end up going to my head at some point. Humans are by our nature a little bit egoistic, especially if sufficient quantities of smoke are swirling around our duodenum. I am determined to not let this happen to me at all costs. I cannot imagine anything I would look back on and cringe at more than a version of me in my late 20s thinking I “have this philosophy thing all figured out”. I have a note on my desk that simply reads “never believe your own hype” to combat this. I truly believe that intellectual humility is probably the best way to ensure you continue learning, and so I want to keep that firmly in mind as time goes on.

2. I worry that people are overestimating me slightly. I have a masters and an undergrad in philosophy - that is all as qualifications go. I have not published papers. I have not held academic positions. I have not even completed a PhD. I am no expert on, well, anything really. I try to emphasise this in my videos by encouraging people to take whatever I say with a pinch of salt, and that these are largely meant to give people access to information that they can use in their own thinking, rather than dictate some fundamental truth about the universe.

So those are my three observations about being a very minor public figure in a very niche corner of the internet. But if there is one thing I hope people would take away from this post it is the following:

Any public communication of almost anything online is almost always simplifying, and probably simplifying considerably. I aim for my videos to be primers in various philosophical topics. But I am not an expert, and these videos will not make anyone an expert. As I try to mention in the videos themselves, they are really intended to spark your own thinking on an issue.

In other words, there is not much I find more terrifying than the prospect of people thinking I’m right about things.