Life as a YouTuber

Discussion

Would you like to be a YouTuber? What would be the positive and negative things about the job?

Would you like to be a YouTube star? Read about the life of Jessii Vee to find out

Do strange, funny or interesting things happen to you a lot? Are you good at telling stories? Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people wanting to hear about your life?

That’s what life is like for YouTube star, Jessii Vee. Her videos of funny stories about herself have been watched over 150 million times and subscribers to her channel grow every day. In just a month she can gain thousands of new subscribers, and videos that are only a few days old typically have 150,000+ views. 

Jessii’s just a regular 23-year-old living in Ontario, Canada, with a talent for turning her life into her work, six days a week. ‘My days change depending on if it’s the beginning of the week or the end,’ says Jessii. Typically, I’ll spend all of Sunday thinking of ideas and planning videos that I want to film that week. Then, on Monday, I’ll wake up early to start filming. Usually a video will take just over an hour to film, and I try to film around five, so it takes up most of my day. Then, from Tuesday to Friday, I edit them.’

Being a YouTuber isn’t just about making videos. Jessii also spends a few hours a week replying to messages from her subscribers. Sometimes she meets fans in person because, since she passed 700,000 subscribers, people recognise her when she goes out. ‘It’s so funny because I can meet subscribers anywhere and everywhere,’ she says. ‘The other day I went to buy coffee and there was a girl serving me who almost dropped my coffee when she realised it was me. She actually left the coffee shop to meet me in the parking lot to take pictures. It always makes me happy to see them greet me with a huge smile.’

Online life isn’t all wonderful and Jessii used to feel bad when people said negative things about her. ‘Some people online are so quick to write hate comments,’ she explains. Some people said that she has huge cheeks and really thin lips. It made her feel bad until she found strength inside herself. ‘I realised that the things people were hating on were things about myself that I couldn’t change. So I decided to love those things and I became more confident in myself.’ Now, she understands that hate comments come from people who don’t feel good about themselves.

So, for anyone who wants to start a YouTube channel, there are some things to think about. It should be fun, so one thing you might want to do is turn off the comments so you won’t get any negative ones from people who have nothing better to do. Privacy and being safe are very important so, for example, you don’t need to show your face or real name and you shouldn’t tell people where you live. One of the most famous YouTubers, DanTDM, a 26-year-old English man whose videos have over 10 billion views (if that number is too big to imagine, compare it with something like the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics that were watched by 5 billion people all over the world), began his YouTube career playing ‘Minecraft’ and telling stories about the characters in the game. In 2017, he went on a tour, doing live shows, in the UK, America and Australia. But in the beginning he didn’t show his face.

Jessii has some advice about what kind of videos to make. ‘Be yourself. Don’t change to try to make people like you. They will fall in love with YOU! When I first started YouTube, I wanted to look good and act in a way that people would like. In my old videos, I seem uncomfortable because I’m not being myself. But in my videos now, you can see that I’m completely myself. I’m crazy and strange, and I don’t care what people think.’

Jessii also says you should make your channel about something you really care about because that will inspire people. People know when you only care about being popular. ‘When you actually focus on something you love, you’ll grow so much faster, trust me!’

Hidden treasure in the Rocky Mountains

Thousands of people are looking for treasure worth $2 million. It was buried in the Rocky Mountains by a rich art expert called Forrest Fenn.

It’s not only pirates in stories who go hunting for buried treasure. Every year, thousands of people search in the Rocky Mountains in the US for hidden treasure worth $2 million. And the clues to where it is are written in a poem.

The treasure was buried by an art expert, Forrest Fenn, in 2010. He was 80 when he made the trip into the Rocky Mountains by car and then on foot. So that’s one clue: it is somewhere an old man could walk to with a heavy box. But the nine main clues in the poem (available to read on his website) are much more difficult to understand. Treasure hunters look at the meaning of every word in the poem and they look for extra clues in Forrest’s two books about his life.

Here is one part to get you started:

Begin it where warm waters stop
And take it in the canyon down,
Not far, but too far to walk.
Put in below the home of Brown.

There are many possible meanings. You can probably start with ‘warm waters’ and ‘the home of Brown’. Some people look for a place where warm and cold water meet, perhaps two rivers. Others look for a more poetic meaning, for example a person’s tears could be warm water. Brown might be a person because names usually start with a capital letter. So maybe you have to look for people called Brown who live in the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, Brown is a very common surname!

These places must be near a canyon, but what does the third line mean? How far is ‘too far to walk’? Also, ‘put in’ is a strange way to say ‘go’, so maybe Forrest chose those words for a reason. You can see why people spend a long time finding clues, can’t you?

The only way to test your ideas is to follow the clues to try and find the treasure. Forrest advises people to wait until spring to avoid dangerous winter weather and he says people shouldn’t go alone. But not everyone has listened to his advice. Three people have gone missing while looking for the treasure. Police who work in the area want Forrest to take back the treasure and put a photo of himself with the box on the internet. They think the treasure hunters will stop looking and no more will die.

But Forrest refuses. He thinks people spend too much time inside their houses and offices on their computers and phones. He remembers his own childhood adventures in the Rocky Mountains and he wants families to learn about nature and have adventures together.

His plan is working. Joe’s dad took him camping in the woods and he says, ‘I enjoyed the adventure of it. We saw some bears but our dog scared them away before I had to shoot them with my gun. But we had to sleep on the ground in the freezing cold and everything got wet. We couldn’t even light the fire.’

Some treasure hunters have been out looking for the box too many times to count. Marti and her daughter Libbi travel from their home in Georgia to search in Montana. Libbi says: ‘The thought of bears around every corner was a horrible fear for the first two years, but you slowly lose the fear of animals. I love the scenery of Montana – seeing so many animals up close, camping in the mountains and crossing rivers and streams. It’s all so exciting, even if we never find the treasure.’

But there are people who think the whole thing is a trick. Some say maybe Forrest had a box of treasure, but they don’t believe he hid it in the mountains. Others say he took it back years ago. They say maybe he just likes the attention. But even the people who complain it’s a trick often still go to the Rocky Mountains to test their ideas. Of course, one possibility is that someone has already found the treasure and not told anyone. But that won’t stop hundreds more people going treasure hunting this spring. Where would you start looking?

The Shoemaker and the Devil

Can money buy happiness? If money doesn’t make people happy then they probably are not spending it right. Being rich implies having responsibilities and obligations which people don’t want to deal with, whereas being happy implies how well people handle their inner selves. This is what we see in the mystic story “The Shoemaker and the Devil” by famous Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov. He wanted his readers to see that money is not everything. He does not want people to be so obsessed with being rich that they would do anything to obtain it. Chekhov used humor and other stylistic devices to reveal his story.

The story focuses on Fyodor Nilov, a poor, envious and greedy shoemaker who, was prone to drink and wanted to become rich at any expense, since he thought that all his imagined benefits came with wealth. He contemplated: “How splendid it would be if the rich, little by little, changed into beggars having nothing, and he, a poor shoemaker, were to become rich, and were to lord it over some other poor shoemaker on Christmas Eve.” So he made a bargain with the devil (thinking that grass is always greener on the other side), became rich and the devil got his soul. Yet, he discovered something he was not prepared for. He had a new wife but he did not know how to behave with her. Not only does he constantly want more and more, but he also does not become a superior person. He believed that having more money and things would give him more happiness. But in reality, it was completely different. After realizing how little all of that meant, he was too late and it was time for him to pay. 

Nevertheless, if people became rich in an instant – without truly earning it – they would feel just as unsatisfied as the shoemaker. “Carriages and sledges with bearskin rugs were dashing to and fro in the street; merchants, ladies, officers were walking along the pavement together with the humbler folk. . . . But Fyodor did not envy them nor repine at his lot. It seemed to him now that rich and poor were equally badly off. Some were able to drive in a carriage, and others to sing songs at the top of their voice and to play the concertina, but one and the same thing, the same grave, was awaiting all alike, and there was nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of one’s soul,” Fyodor thought.