I Spent Four Hours Making a Video. A Guy Stared at a Camera and Won.

I tried posting on Twitter for a while because, for some reason, I wanted to become a content creator.

And when I started, I honestly thought it would be easier than I expected.

Not easy in the sense that I would post three videos and become famous overnight.

I knew that wasn't going to happen.

But I thought the difficult part would be making the content.

Turns out, no.

Making stuff is actually the easy part.

The hardest part is getting anyone to discover that you made something in the first place.

You can spend four hours making a video, editing it, adding music, trying to make it funny and watching it over and over again until you don't even know if it's good anymore.

Then you post it.

And wait.

A few likes.

So naturally, I started paying attention to what other people were doing.

I wanted to know what actually gets attention.

And that was probably my first mistake.

Because once you start looking at numbers, you notice something very quickly:

Effort means absolutely nothing.

At some point I found a Deltarune Short.

It was basically a red stick figure, an equals sign and a heart.

Then another stick figure.

Then another.

Eight of them.

From what I could tell, the guy had drawn them using what looked like a Snapchat drawing tool.

That was the video.

Four likes.

And I remember looking at it and doing the worst thing you can possibly do when you're trying to enjoy making things:

I started doing math.

I spend four hours on something.

This guy probably spent half an hour.

He got about a third of the likes I was getting.

So why the hell was I putting four hours into anything?

Obviously, four likes aren't exactly internet fame.

That wasn't the point.

The point was that I had started seeing content as some horrible equation.

Hours in.

Likes out.

And the equation made absolutely no sense.

Then I found this guy on a livestream.

He didn't say anything.

He just sat there.

Vaped.

Looked directly into the camera.

158 likes.

And the worst part?

I watched him too.

So I analyzed what he was doing.

Apparently, all you need to make it as a content creator is a red wig and the ability to stare dead into a camera.

Naturally, I analyzed more of his content.

And that's when I realized he was missing his left eye.

The wig had been covering that side of his face the entire time.

Suddenly I felt bad for the guy.

But, in some horrible little corner of my brain, I was also jealous.

Not because he was missing an eye, obviously.

I was jealous because this man had somehow figured out content creation.

He could sit there, vape, stare into a camera and people would watch.

Meanwhile I'm sitting there thinking about editing, music, jokes, retention and whether the first three seconds of my video are interesting enough.

And that's probably the stupidest thing social media has done to my brain.

It made me think effort should be rewarded proportionally.

Four hours should beat thirty minutes.

Editing should beat a Snapchat drawing.

A carefully made video should beat a guy staring into a camera.

But apparently that's not how attention works.

Maybe I had misunderstood content creation this entire time.

And now I'm posting this here as another experiment.

I want to see how Vocal handles a three-minute story compared to the longer stuff I've been posting.

Which means I've done it again.

I made something, posted it online and immediately started thinking about the numbers.

Maybe I really haven't learned anything.

Maybe I don't need better content.

Maybe I just need a red wig.

Or some dancing stickmen.