YOUNG WRITERS OUT THERE, THIS ONE’S FOR YOU
My Goal In Life Is To Get People To Read Less
I’m making “Turning Medium articles into YouTube videos” a whole thing now
Did you ever think, “I sure love writing, but I wish people wouldn’t read so much?”
I take it the dilemma is familiar to every writer. Maybe you write multiple times a week, probably every day, more than likely in situations when you should be doing something else.
You “love doing it”, you’re “really into it”, it’s “who you are” — but still. What you’re mainly doing is indulging a compulsion, breathing in that last particle of pencil shaving dust like you just scored it at 3 a.m. in the parking lot.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. I write, fifth coffee in hand, while the sun — this unknown mysterious being I dimly recall from children’s books — rises and sets, unnoticed, trying to get my attention while I prefer the loving company of closed blinds and flickering light bulbs.
All that is to say — I sure love writing! Colon-closed parenthesis emoji, vibing cat .gif, third thing.
BUT —there is also something deeply worrying about people reading so much.
I am — in addition to being a professional writer — also a professional content creator. It is no secret to any of my literally tens of Twitter followers that my ultimate goal in life is to become a YouTube billionaire. As such, I am keenly attuned to the preferred ways of content consumption of the youths.
Now the death of the written word has been proclaimed many times. Mostly by people whose texts are so tedious and steeped in nostalgia that you start to question whether words have ever been alive in the first place.
But reading is fine. Books are fine. The written word is fine.
As a writer, this makes me happy. As a YouTube content creator, this worries me. What if the youths of today spend too much time reading and not enough time watching my videos?
Who is gonna make me a billionaire then?
Out of those noble considerations, I have decided to make turning Medium articles into YouTube videos a whole thing. I wrote a very informative piece over at Catness about whether people who don’t have a cat at home should nevertheless take the plunge and purchase some kitty litter. Now this article is available for your listening/viewing “pleasure” in YouTube video format.
This will allow me to continue writing while at the same time putting out my work in such a way that I no longer need to worry about contributing to raising a generation of nerds who go outside and read and stuff.
I hope you enjoy it and will not forget about me once I’ve made it big.
Cat emoji with heart eyes.
This article was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Hogan Torah. If you like this article, it was all my idea and he just said something that didn’t really have anything to do with what I’ve written and just prompted the idea. If you dislike it, he basically wrote this whole thing and I hacked his drafts and stole the article.
Shoutout to Louise Peacock for publishing the original article on Catness!
