Good morning, Hank.

It's Tuesday. So I'm taking some time off, and  this is a video about why.

But first,  I just need to congratulate you on your comedy special. It is so so good,  and I am so so proud of you. Okay, so in the 17 and a half years  that we've been making videos, I've never had to do this, and I feel  really bad about it.

But as maybe is indicated from recent video titles,  including “how it all ends”, “A Midlife Crisis” and “Not Doing That Great”,  I have not been doing that great. So the headline is, I will be at Vidcon  this weekend and online for the next few days, but then I'm going to take  the month of July away from the Internet entirely to see if that helps.  And we'll see how I feel in August. Now, it's hard for me to know where  circumstances end and depression begins.

It is true that I've been going  through an objectively hard time in ways that aren't public, and I don't  want to be public. But it's also true that I've been through harder times  in the last 17 and a half years without feeling this much despair. But when  I'm in a state of depression, which I have been for quite a while,  it's really hard for me to analyze what is and is not really real because  everything great feels illusory and everything terrible feels utterly true.  But I guess in terms of my ability to do my job, there are really two issues.  First, I need to finish this book so that it can come out next year.  And that alone feels like it's too much work for my depressed brain.  And second, to be honest with you, for a little over nine months, I've just  really struggled with making stuff.

Now, this is probably the warped  perceptions of a depressed consciousness. But like, I recently  spoke to brotherhood 2.0 resident mathematician Daniel Biss, who is  now the mayor of the city of Evanston, Illinois. And he was  explaining to me why he left Twitter.

He was like, I thought I was bringing  a bucket of clean water every day to the toxic lake that is Twitter.  And I knew, of course, that the place had structural problems and  incentivized bad faith discourse as part of its architecture. But I figured,  every day I'll bring my little bucket of clean water to try to clean up  that lake. But then eventually he explained to me, I realized I wasn't  cleaning the lake at all.

I was dumping a bucket of clean water  into a toxic lake, which does nothing but raise the level of the toxic lake  while also ruining a bit of clean water. And that's kind of how I feel trying  to make stuff right now, to be honest with you. Especially on Twitter or  TikTok or whatever, but also everywhere.

I genuinely don't know if I should be  making anything, if my stuff is helping anyone, or if it's just  ultimately raising the level of the toxic lake. Now, to be clear, I feel this  less on vlogbrothers than anywhere else on the Internet, but I am still just  really overwhelmed. It feels like all of my nerves are on the outside of  my body and I just I can't do it right now and I just need to take  some time away and get that sorted.

One last message before I take  that break. As you can probably tell, I am currently a bit demented by  despair. But in that respect I know that I am not alone.

Every worthwhile  thing I try to convince myself I’ve done, depression counters with “actually,  the world would better if you hadn’t done that”. Depression, which  produces so little, is astonishingly effective at out thinking me.  It convinces me that I am worthless and that my work is worse than  worthless. And I am speaking to you now from the bottom  of the well.

But even so, I want to say, as a goodbye for now, despair is a lie.  Hopelessness is a lie. No simple story can ever be true.  And there is no simpler story than nothing means anything.  You not being loved or worthy of love is a lie.  Your passion and work and enthusiasm and spark of conscious  not mattering is a lie. But even in telling you this, I'm struggling to  tell it to myself.

And that's the main thing I'll be working on in July.  I'll be working on telling myself what I've been telling you this whole time,  which is that hope sings the tune without the words and never stops  at all. Hank, I'll see you on Friday and you'll see me in August.