Good morning, John!

Two days ago, Dan Howell uploaded a video called "Why I Quit Youtube," and the first half of it is one of the most eloquent, thoughtful and - in my opinion - accurate takes on the history of YouTube and the many bad parts of being a YouTuber.

And there's not much I can add to it, like, it's very good- I agree with everything in it, which is weird because I've talked to Dan, like, twice in my life. Also, it's 85 minutes long and we have a 4-minute time limit. But, listening to a summation of some of the worst parts of the last 15 years of my life did make me kinda wonder why... why didn't we quit?

Why haven't we burnt out on this? Why didn't we focus on some of the many other things that we had to focus on, and just like... "sorry YouTube, we're done!"

Certainly a lot of other people have done that, and I respect that decision a lot, like, I understand. And I can't answer this question for you, John, because I think this is very personal, I think that different people respond to all this stuff very differently, but I can think back to the times when I did kind of entertain the idea of maybe quitting. And it has been because the weight got too heavy for the support that I had to carry.

And to get an idea, here are two of the forms that that weight has taken.

First, feeling a responsibility that I cannot live up to, to be like, everyone's 'unproblematic king'. Like, to not only be what I have attempted to say that I am - which is already a fairly high standard - but also to be what everyone is imagining me to be, which is, of course, impossible, because people imagine different things.

Like, occasionally I'll say something on Twitter that is something that I have believed for a long time, like, since high school, and people will be like "wow man, you've changed."
And I'll be like "yes, I have! I have! But not in that- not that thing. That thing has been the same."

So that's hard, and one thing I think a lot about is that, like, people have too many reasons to kind of lose faith in the world right now. And I- the last thing I want to be is one of them.

Another form that the weight can take is having people really dislike me and be mean to me on the internet. It's a thing that happens, it hasn't happened in a while, but it has happened. And it's bad.

And so in those moments when it has been bad, that has made me feel like "why am I doing this? I don't have the support necessary to carry this weight."

And John, I think that we have been very lucky in both the weight department, like, not carrying as much as we might have if we got less lucky or had different lives, and in the support department, where we just have good support.

Good support - which can be both external and external, like, I am my own support, but I have support around me - it allows you to just, like, handle the weight when it's sort of, like, piling on. But to enjoy it when it's, like, an appropriate amount. Because, of course, some weight is good!

I want some responsibility! I want people to rely on me! I want to be held to a standard!

I want to take what we have, regardless of whether we deserve it - because what is 'deserving'? - and do the best things we can with it. That is what makes the weight actually feel good. And that is, I think why this community has done so much different stuff over the years. We kind of shoulder it all together, and we do good things with it.

Like, for example, the Awesome Socks Club, which has donated over $1 million to Partners in Health for our work in Sierra Leone. We have a short signup window open now. If you want to check if out, there's a link in the description.

Every week I make a video, it could be my last video, and I know 100% that every person watching would be supportive of me stepping away if I felt like I had to.

I did not upload this video today because I felt like I had to - I uploaded this video today because I feel like our work here isn't done! And I don't know if I could've articulated that before I watched Dan's video, so, Dan, thank you for that!

After 15 years - because of your support and our parents' support, and our friends' support and Katherine and Sarah's support, and the support of all the people we work with at Complexly and DFTBA, and, you know, hopefully by engaging thoughtfully in what we are attempting to do... it's not like we don't talk about it a lot. We talk about it a lot - we've been able to continue creating together and the weight has, for the most part, remained healthy, and the support, for the most part, has remained strong.

How I'm feeling after all that is just grateful to have had the luck and the support that we have had, without which, to be certain, we would not have not gotten all these cool things done and we would have quit. Like, that's absolutely true.

So, to everybody who's been a part of this: thank you, thank you, thank you. We're very lucky.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.