Stream Less, but Better
Streaming is not like a normal job where you can put in the hours and get your fair wage at the end, but streamers are treating it that way, resulting in bitter disappointment when they get so little in return for their efforts. I’ve seen much depression in this industry, and its mainly due to physical and emotional burnout.
The problem
You hear the snide comments all the time: “I wish I could just sit around and get paid to play video games“, but the truth is, a streamer doesn’t get paid to play video games. They get paid to entertain, and honestly the time and emotional energy they put in usually far exceeds what they receive back in monetary and social reward.
With the exception of high profile esports athletes and people who were already famous before they started, most streamers can’t afford to ignore chat to just enjoy the game they’re playing. To keep (and hopefully grow) their audience, they need to be entertaining.
‘Entertaining’ doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of the stereotypical high energy streamer bouncing off the walls with dramatic reactions to anything that happens. No, the entertainment could simply be a relaxed atmosphere with pleasant chatter about interesting topics and a bit of understated dry humour. But, either way, nobody’s entertaining all the time. Nobody’s in a good mood all the time. Nobody feels like dealing with other people all the time.
Yet, so many streamers think they need to do 8 hour streams, 5 days a week and more. They think if they put the time in, the success will come, and…with most careers that’s true, but not with entertainment.
Nobody wants to sit watching you yawning and depressed or snippy. With other desk jobs you can get away with being a cranky jackass. You can sit there and endure through bad moods and low energy because you don’t have an audience to entertain. You can sit there with a slack jawed expression and maybe a little bit of drool, and just get on with it for 8 hours until home time.
But when the job is entertainment, your audience would rather have you at your best for 2/3 hours than subpar you for 6 to 8 hours.
Not only are we not always at our peak all day in terms of being entertaining, but if all you do is stream, then you are also going to become increasingly more boring over time. This is because you will have nothing new to talk about because you spend all your time streaming instead of experiencing things in the real world, and getting recharged by external stimuli.
The point of all this is that: your output (time spent) does not equal input (money earned or followers gained). Inside you, it won’t feel just. You will feel like you wasted your time…and you have.
The Solution
- Rather identify when your peak energy levels are during a typical day, and choose a few (not more than 6 hours) around that time to have your regular stream, and not more than 5 days a week. None of the really popular streamers are putting in more hours than that.
- You could take an hour out of the time you’ve saved to read/watch news centered around the topics you like to talk about on stream. That way, you have a few conversation starters.
- You can take 30 mins out of the time you’ve saved to do something active. Regular exercise will make you feel powerful and in control of your life, and exercise has been proven to help with mental health by reducing anxiety and depression. Taking a walk in the sun will also have the added benefit of you gaining vitamin D – the deficiency of which is linked with depression.
- You can take a further 30 mins out of your saved time to prepare healthy food, which also has been proven to lift mood and lessen mental health issues.
If you’re feeling depressed because of how little you get back from all the hours you put in, or if you feel guilt and anxiety when you aren’t putting in the hours, then I hope this article has put some things into perspective for you. <3
More streaming and mental health articles coming soon.
Sources
- More Bad News About Sitting: It May Harm Workers’ Mental Health
- Exercise and Mental Health
- Exercise For Mental Health
- Does Vitamin D Boost Mental Health?
- Can What You Eat Affect How You Feel?
- Is Our Modern Diet Behind Our Mental Health Crisis?
- Photo by Fredrick Tendong on Unsplash