The YouTubers are not okay

polygon.com:

For three years, Dan Howell didn’t post anything on YouTube, and for his 6 million subscribers, this was a very big deal. As one half of the longtime vlogger duo Dan and Phil, he was known for writing and performing sketch comedy, internet culture commentary, and occasionally more serious vlogs about mental illness. A typical Dan and Phil endeavor, be it a book or a world tour or a series, might be called something like “The Super Amazing Project” or “Interactive Introverts,” nodding to early memes associated with “smol bean” culture. Naturally, they became superstars, particularly among teenage girls.

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But after posting a coming out video in 2019 called “Basically I’m Gay,” Howell went completely silent on the platform. That was until last week, when he returned with a feature film-length monologue on why he quit YouTube in the first place.

For years, digital creators have been trying to convey the ennui of this supposed dream job: they’re lonely, they’re burnt out, they’re built up then tossed aside by unfeeling algorithms and corporate bureaucracy. They feel stuck between the kinds of content that makes them money and the content they actually want to produce.

Howell enumerated these reasons and more, all of which are good reasons to quit a job you hate. Another, less discussed one, however, is something I’ve come to call “YouTube brain.” Compare it to “Twitter brain,” in which spending too much time on Twitter results in someone becoming argumentative and perpetually outraged, or “Instagram brain,” (image-obsessed and overly materialistic), or “TikTok brain,” (unquestioningly