YouTube stars heading for burnout

That's why we have this new term, 'golden handcuffs', which has never been applied to anyone born before 1995.

It's more of a precarization than an entrepreneurialization.

An entrepreneur has bigger stakes but also a bigger payoff than being paid to ride their car as an Uber for example.

That is clearly not what they were saying. That is an incredibly callous way of dismissing someone else's problems.

From the article:

> Lees developed a thyroid problem, and began to experience more frequent and persistent stretches of depression.

There is a well-established link between thyroid issues and burnout. See this comment from Amy Hoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633063 The deeper takeaway is that burnout is not just someone saying "oh I don't like my job". It is a specific condition with measurable physical effects.

I almost burned out a few years ago. I quit the job I was working in, took a few months off, then looked for a less-demanding freelance job to recover. The thing is, in the "recovery" job, I actually worked about twice as many hours and was about 4x more productive. But it was majorly less stressful - I simply came in to the office in the morning, picked the latest tickets on Trello, worked on them, then went home.

In the previous job, I probably did about 20 hours actual work/week, and spent a lot of time twiddling my thumbs. But the organisation was in total chaos, with projects started and cancelled all over the place. I could go the extra mile on a piece of work and have it completely ignored, then get chewed out publicly for something I'd had no idea I was expected to do. I tried to be proactive and solve these problems, but it was an exercise in futility and frustration.

Burnout is not caused by "working hard", it's caused by a combination of things, usually some form of working hard and failing repeatedly, especially when the failure was caused by factors beyond your control (such as management politics, or in the case of YouTube stars, the all-powerful algorithm). This has been fairly well-researched and documented. Amy Hoy described it as "training your brain to associate hard work with failure", which is pretty succinct.

(For anyone who wants to learn more - burnout is pretty common amongst programmers and startup people - this is a good resource for overcoming some of the cognitive issues involved: https://www.thinkingdirections.com/blog/burnout/).

The Youtubers in the article described their problems clearly and eloquently, it enrages me to hear people callously dismiss them in this way.

There is a solid kernal of truth here, PTSD generally relies on clear and obvious trauma... That said, CPTSD has lots of nuanced angles, the original quote was "contribute[s] to" PTSD (not "cause"), and I think the required emotional investment to produce content vs horrendous comment content from YouTube commenters has been overlooked.

Particularly on an IT forum: stress stemming from continuous urgency and unending negativity, a la customer support or helpdesk work, is a major problem and a silent killer. Combined with burnout? That's where you get into serious health issues. Chronic stress combined with feelings of helplessness, being overwhelmed, or being attacked cause trauma by themselves. Socially we are terrible at addressing those burdens on our employees, and it stretches into PTSD-ish territory

Reading fan mail? How about rape and death threats? How about invasive comments about how your nipples have been showing more/less with each video? How about abject racism and brutal sexism and blatant trolling about your appearance? That's before we get to unrelenting shit talking about you and your work...

You may very well be right that PTSD isn't always a precise diagnosis of the issue. But if anyone is getting regular death threats based on something important to them over a long period of time, then the nuanced distinctions between life-destroying stress conditions, PTSD, and CPTSD are something they're gonna spend some time discussing with their therapist. That's how our brains work.