Where My Head's At

So, where am I at in my head right now?

I’m in a stressful, but positive place. I walked away from Drunken Peasants (my successful podcast), and I’m still dealing with the fallout from that. I started a new show called Deep Fat Fried that is gaining a little bit of traction, and starting to get its own fanbase. It still has a long way to go, but early signs are encouraging. It’s hard to start something new in the shadow of what you’ve already done, but I’m feeling that Drunken Peasants shadow begin to recede.

Making money on the YouTube platform is more and more challenging. I’ve found it impossible to gain new subs, and I instead continue to lose them. My views have gone way down. I’m back to the point of being happy if a video can make it to 100k views. And that’s where I was like 4 or 5 years ago. So I feel like I’ve taken a big step backwards there. I am pretty proud of the stuff I’ve done recently, and I am just bummed that more people haven’t seen it.

I find it hard to get into what everyone cares about right now, which is this internet bloodsports thing: people competing for the support of an ever more fickle and unpleasable audience, with flavors of the month coming and going like dicks in a prostitute’s vagina. And It’s all just a very boring rehash of the typical left vs. right arguments that we've all heard ad neaseum.

People are taking pride in being unreasonable extremists. No one talking about ideas. Everyone trying to one-up the talking points of retarded talking heads to prove that they’re slightly less retarded talking heads.

I think both sides are shit. And I’m tired of saying even that. I’m tired of paying attention. I know I could get bigger views if I joined the mob and pandered to the masses. Hell, I talked about Logan Paul and my views went way up. I know how to follow trends. But I’d rather set them.

I was one of the first atheist voices on YouTube. I was one of the first anti-SJW voices on YouTube, if not the very first. I watched the atheist community turn into a dogmatic bunch of self-aggrandizing pansies perpetually shining their good guy badges. I watched the anti-SJWs turn into snowflakes who get triggered every bit as easily as the SJWs they mock. The things I have helped to create have all been perverted by people who are the embodiment of that which I was trying to defeat. It’s like reverse alchemy. A bunch of dumb twats who figured out how to turn gold into led.

I guess it’s fair to say that my confidence is shaken. Not only has everything I helped to create become the embodiment of what I sought to defeat, but the things people now care about are so banal to me that I can’t even be paid to care. And everything I spent ten years creating is withering before me. But, I’m not really as discouraged as you might imagine. I know that as long as I am alive, I will create. And whether that creation is experienced by one person or one million isn’t as important as the creation itself. Not to me.

There’s really no stopping me, unless you kill me. It’s like the movie Quills. They have the Marquis De Sade locked up in an asylum, and he is writing his perverse smut for the masses. So they take away his paper and his quills. So he writes with wine on his clothes, using a chicken bone as a quill. When they take that away from him, he writes with his own blood. When they lock him in the dungeon with nothing left to write with, he writes on the walls with his own shit. They can’t stop him. And I’m the same way. You can’t stop me, unless you’ve got the guts to kill me.

This time last year, I was getting 200k-300k views per video on average. Now I’m getting 60k to 80k. So, let’s say an average of 250k views down to an average of 70k views. That’s a 72% reduction in average views in a year. Now, I’m obviously not objective, but I don’t feel like I’ve gotten 72% worse at what I do in a year.

I think there are a lot of factors for why I suck now. YouTube doesn’t always notify my subscribers, they don’t recommend me as much to nonsubscribers as they used to, the even unsubscribe people from my channel. I’ve had people tell me they’ve been unsubbed multiple times. YouTube often doesn’t allow my videos to be monetized, and unmonetized videos definitely tend to get buried by YouTube’s algorithyms. So, in a lot of ways, YouTube has fucked me.

But there are other factors. Like I said, I’m not very interested in current YouTube trends, so a lot of people aren’t watching what I’m doing, because it’s not what’s hot right now. I think rebranding hurt me, since I spent a decade pushing The Amazing Atheist brand, only to suddenly switch to TJ Kirk in an ultimately futile attempt to subvert YouTube’s ad filters. I stretched myself thin by doing too much Drunken Peasants, which left big content gaps on my channel. And honestly, I’ve become more and more resentful of making content for fans and been more self-indulgent with my content.

I think YouTube has made an effort to fuck over my channel, but I’ve definitely made some decisions of my own that helped facilitate my own downfall. I can’t blame it all on YouTube.

I can tell you one thing though, whether I continue to decline or whether I see a resurgence, it won’t matter. Because I’m a creator and creators create. This will not stop. I will not stop. Not until someone plants a bullet in my head. Or my heart gives out. Or whatever ends up killing my fat ass.

That’s a fucking promise.

Now, what do I hope? I hope that things get better. And I’m already working on plans for that. But you’re my audience, and I’ve always believed in telling you where my heads at. And right now, this is where I am. Looking at the wreckage of my career and saying, “Fuck. How am I going to put this debris back together?” And I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know if it’s possible. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Because whether I’m a success or a failure, I’m going to keep going. I’ve always liked the saying, “The Fastest Way Out Is Through.” And I’m going to test that. I hope you’ll stick with me. But if not, it was nice riding with you.

I’m TJ KIRK, PTFO