TRANSCRIPT
I would like to talk about how fame, if it comes at all, is fleeting. The closest example I have to being famous was two years ago. One of my videos kind of blew up on YouTube. Lots of people started watching it. This was my video on the six reasons why I quit being a psychotherapist. It had already been up, I think, for six months by this point. It had gotten some views, maybe a few thousand views, and then one day, for reasons completely unbeknownst to me, boom! It became extremely popular. Somehow the algorithms on YouTube started promoting it massively, and it started getting watched all the time. It was totally unexpected. I checked my phone, “Well, let’s see how my YouTube video is doing,” and boom! In the last, like, six hours, it had been viewed like 4,000 times. I was like, “Is this possible?” It was like a massive spike, maybe 200 comments, and it was like, “Whoa, what was going on?” And it went on and on and on. This went on for weeks and weeks and weeks, this massive peak. It did something to my mind. I’d never experienced anything quite like that to that intensity. Yeah, I’d had some of my films be popular. I’d been invited to other countries and things like that. I’d gotten a couple of grants, but never like thousands and thousands and 10,000 people every day watching some video of mine and watching a large percentage of it often and really liking it. Also, it wasn’t like negative popularity that I see sometimes—lots of people watching a video because they hate it. People really got something out of this. Well, I’d like to say, “Oh, that was so cool!” Yes, I didn’t feel much by it, but it did affect me. It kind of made me feel like, “Oh, I’m loved! I’m honored! The world has finally seen me.” I’ve had so many years of my life, I think the worst years of my life being my teen years, where nobody saw me, nobody liked me, or very, very few people. I was unpopular. I was disliked. I was teased. I was bullied. I was tormented. I was alienated. And this was even going on inside my own family of origin when I felt like I was the least popular member of my family. I was really having a lot of conflict, being disliked, being criticized, and put down a lot, often for my best qualities. Well, suddenly here, some of my best qualities are being recognized and seen. And in some way, the part of me that’s still hurt, that still carries some of the wounds from my childhood, from my teen years, even into my 20s, was being assuaged by becoming popular now, by being liked now. All those people pressing like, and it did feel good. It was kind of like a drug, to be honest. It was a little bit like getting a buzz off of drinking about three or four beers, and like, “Whoa, I could really feel this!” It went to my head. It made me feel special and important and elated. It put me in an extremely good mood, and this went on for weeks and weeks. And then I noticed it started to go down slowly, slowly, slowly. And it was like, it kind of hurt. And then one day, I noticed, “Oh, it dropped out,” and like only two, three hundred people watched that video in the whole day. And I felt rotten, and I felt depressed, and I felt lost and frustrated. “Why is this happening to me?” And it brought back some of those old feelings from being a teenager. I’m not liked anymore, and it was like, “Ah!” I realized that I’m going into withdrawal from the drug of fame. And I was like, at least I could see that. I could recognize what was happening, but it still hurt. It felt lousy, but it helped to have that intellectual self-reflective perspective on what was going on. At least I knew, even though it didn’t feel good, this really wasn’t connected to anything I was or wasn’t doing. It was just something with YouTube’s algorithms. Well then, strangely, oh my god, it became popular again, and it boosted up. And it was like, “Why is this happening?” And I felt great again. It was like the drug came back. All the depression instantly went away, and then it came back for a while, and then I kind of crested and went down again. And well, at least for the last year or so, it hasn’t been so popular. It kind of dropped off the radar. And that’s when I realized most clearly that fame, it truly is fleeting. Popularity can be fleeting. Beauty is fleeting. It fades. You can have it, you can lose it, and it’s not really a reflection of who you are, who I am on the inside. And how have I dealt with it? Well, one thing that made me really consider is, do I want to keep making videos if they’re not so popular? If I could have a video that now has over half a million views, mostly because of that big cresting burst that it had for reasons unknown, well, do I want to make videos if they only get 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 views or 500 views sometimes? Is it worth it? Is it worth it if I’m not going to become super famous and super popular, even though some people get so much more popular? And then I thought, “Daniel, are you really making videos to become popular? Is that your purpose?” And what I had to consider when I really answered that question deep inside myself is, no, I didn’t do this, and I’m not doing this to be popular. Being popular is nice, don’t get me wrong. I like it. I wish I were more popular, though sometimes. Be careful what you wish for; you never know what the downside could be. I made these videos because I have a message that I want to share, and also I love the creative process. I’ve healed a lot of my traumas. I’ve connected so much more clearly with my true self. My true self now has a voice, and I have a platform. I have a camera, I have a microphone, I have a tripod, I have a chair. Sometimes, like right now, I have a safe, quiet place where I can speak my mind. I can do a bit of video editing. There is this platform of YouTube. Why not do it? It feels great to make these videos, and that’s what I had to realize. It feels great to make the videos. It feels great to edit them, sharing them. Okay, it’s scary sometimes. People like them, sometimes people don’t. But what I had to come back to was a phrase I heard long ago, which is, “Take the action and let go of the results.” And for me, that has been my guiding mantra in making these videos. It’s unlikely they’ll become popular like that again, or maybe they will. I really don’t know. The bottom line is my job is to do what feeds my soul, and what feeds my soul is to share my message and to be creative. I think of some people who I read about, watch in the news, and sometimes even have known to varying degrees—people who really got huge, became famous, made lots and lots of money, and then they lost their fame, or maybe they lost their money, and it was devastating for them. I think sometimes some of these people, they probably didn’t have the strongest connection with their inner self before fame, during fame, or after fame. They didn’t have that self-reflective relationship to a strong enough degree to be able to guide them through this process of becoming famous and losing their fame. I think what can easily happen, what kind of happened to me, but I think can happen much more strongly with other people, is people can feel that their fame is a replacement of the self. It becomes a kind of false self, such that they don’t even know it’s not themselves. They actually think of this famous persona that they have as being them, and when they lose that fame, they lose their persona, and it feels like they’ve lost themselves. And some people, if they don’t have a strong enough real true self on the inside to fall back on, they can crash and burn as the result of this. They can feel like they’re stripped of everything, who they are. And so for me, this highlights the real key importance of being a true self, of connecting with the true self.
Me working out the traumas from my childhood that blocked me, that disallowed me from connecting with my true self on the inside, from healing, from nurturing my relationship with me privately, silently, alone. Such that no matter how famous I get, at least in the ideal sense, it’s not going to affect the primary relationship in my life, which is my inner relationship with me.