I'm Bored

A friend of mine once said that nowhere in an adult's life should they ever use the words "I'm bored." I'm here to tell you, I'm bored, and the boredom is coming from YouTube.

I don't know that I can handle another river table, live edge coffee table, desktop organizer, desk with wireless charging built in, night table, coffee table, or entryway key hanging organizer thing. I don't know if this boredom is with the maker community at large, the woodworking maker community, or just the stuff that makes it onto YouTube, but I'm totally burnt out. It seems like everyone is just making the same things over and over again with minor tweaks to eek out a few adsense dollars or to fill a production schedule.

Then there's the folks who are clearly doing it with things like "Best of ___________" month or "__________ rewind" where they just take videos from the past, condense them down and shove 'em into their feed to have content. It's the equivalent of shovelware for YouTube.

I'm just bored. I've recently pared down my subscriptions from around 170 to around 115. It's not that the people who were making videos were doing bad videos, it's that they were doing the same videos. The spark was gone. The love of what they did was fading. They're following trends hoping to hit big rather than being the creatives that I subscribed to.

Then there's the flip side of the coin, which is loaded with people who put massive efforts into doing unique and interesting things. Even for some of the people who I'm most into who are tightly ensconced into a community or a niche, there's still a love and it still shows, and those are the people I want to be around. Those are the people who inspire me. I'm sure your live edge river bookmatched coffee table with hairpin legs is beautiful, but that's only because it was the first time. And the second time. But when a guy like Bernie Solo puts out a video showing how he designed and hand-turned a Sharpie cover, or Chris from Make Everything Workshop shows how to make a knife with $100 worth of Harbor Freight tools, why would I want to watch another river table?

I like to end each blog post with a take-away, and this is my take-away for this one. When you lose your spark and your passion and you start posting filler content into your stream, we notice, as your viewers. When you stop caring it comes through to us a lot quicker than it comes through to you.