Learning How To Edit

The Why

Being Completely Stuck at 34 Years Old

The older you get, the more obvious it becomes that life is a cosmic river. The energy of it pulls you downstream and there is nothing you can do to resist it. You’re engulfed in it’s power completely. You must go down. But just like in a river, you still have the choice to sink or swim. The water is so so strong. It’s exhausting pulling yourself up over the surface of the water. The weight of existence is so heavy. Your arms burns like they are being mauled by lions. Your lungs fight for every small breath, like a drolling starving beast manically consuming a mouthful of steaming guts. The thought of just laying down is so warm. One moment. Just rest for one little moment. One last break and I’ll get up again…

If you let the river defeat you, you sink to the bottom and die. You, as in your potential. You’re ability to open the doors. We are racing down this river at breakneck speed. And alongside them are countless doors. Each of their doors leads to a completely new potential future. A new destiny. But to get to them you have to swim hard.

It doesn’t matter how old you are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a day from death. We are all a day from death. As soon as I press the period mark to end this sentence I’m currently writing, a screw from a passenger jet could fall off it and strike me on the head with perfect comedic timing…

Look’s like I’m safe. At least for now, but my end is rapidly approaching. Car accident. Choke to death on a cookie. Wife stabs me for ignoring the litter box for the thousandth time. Cancer. Already at 34 I can feel my body slowly falling apart. Entropy, evil, sin. It’s winning. Can only fight back for so long. And then the game will finally be over.

I’ve enjoyed the game. I’ve had my wins. I’ve survived a lot. I’ve made things happen that I very much wanted to happen. But here I am, pouring over my receipts, trying to figure out how to stretch a dollar into ten. I don’t want to be doing this. It’s infuriating. Why shouldn’t I be the one? Why do “they” get to have it? Why do “they” get to build mansions and fly 1st class and start businesses and create visions. Why do “they” get to turn dirt into gold? I want it to. Why can’t I be “they”?

Luckily, it has never been easier to change one’s lot in life than right this second. The poorest of us have more agency than a 1600’s king did in classical Spain. And we are smarter too. I have the entire world’s worth of knowledge for free accessible instantly at all times. There is zero excuse.

So I want to play the game. The “get rich” game. Everybody does, but not everybody wants to play the game. It’s a hard game. But I have a strategy. Everybody has money. It’s like blood, you need it. And everybody trades it for things they want and need. To get more money, you either create it or you trade with other people. Creating money is out of the question. The world’s governments claim that job and act violently to anyone else trying it out. I will have to trade for it.

I don’t have very much to trade. Outside a few pokemon cards and my Micheal Crichton book collection, I have nothing valuable to trade for. I already trade most of my free time to my employer. He gives me a thousand dollars a month to help him make his dreams come true. Sadly for me, his dreams don’t include me at all. Unless I figure out a way to help him make his dreams come true even faster, he will not pay me an indian head penny more.

Following that train of thought, it’s clear that I will have to create something to trade for money. Unlike simply creating money though, creating something to trade doesn’t instantly trade itself. You have to learn how to create something that other people want, and then you need to ofter to trade it. However, if you ask one person at a time, you are very unlikely to trade very much. I could go around my neighborhood and try to trade my pokemon cards with every human being I see and I doubt I’d encounter more than 100 people. You have to ofter your trades at scale. You have to connect to people in mass. In super mass. Connect to people in a way previously unimaginable. If someone invented something like that I’d be in business.

Going into Business

Now, if you’re following my thought path, (My thinky-street?) you can see that most likely way to make money is to make a business and try to trade stuff you make to the people who want it. Trying to make money trading your time to other businesses is competitive, slow, and has a high likeliness of failure. Nobody wants to give money away. They don’t want to trade more than they have to. And they will only want to hire the very best talent they can find to increase the likeliness that their dreams come true. You may as well skip that step and just start making your own business and start trying to reach your own dreams.

Now the big question is… what can I trade? I have a short list of skills. I know English pretty well and I use a remarkably small amount of toilet paper. I might be able to write a book about my toilet paper use. After I’ve spent 100+ hours on that 850 page masterpiece, how to I trade it? I post it up on amazon and pray that those aspiring toilet aficionados search me up? I probably wouldn’t even get 100 accidental clicks. And yet, there are certainly thousands of people wanting to hear my voice. How do I find those people?

I have to search for my tribe. My people are out there. That’s why I’m writing this blog piece. But I fear it’s not enough. Who even reads nowadays? I have to go to the source. To the YouTube. YouTube attracts the undivided attention of billions of people very day. Billions. I’m one of them. And God Damn (excuse me God) if I am not blessed to live in a time were you can man a goddamned movie right in your house. My asscheeks never even need to leave the soft heaven that is my sofa.

Finding people who want the same things as you is hard. Making YouTube videos for fellow fans of what you are into is a great way to get started. Show off what you’re creating. Find people who like it. Get new ideas and advice from them. Become good.

But I don’t know how to make YouTube videos.

The How

Time and Effort

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” ~ Ancient China Man

This skill is the biggest blocker in my life. I will not make money making YouTube videos. There are tens of millions of YT channels. Less than 0.25% make even a single cent. There is an incredible high barrier to entry on YT. You need to create high quality, super engaging content. And you need to do that on a consistent basis. Fifty thousand views per month equates to around $100. One million views to make around $2000 dollars. Even I’m not retarded enough to think that my ass wiping tutorials would even get a hundred.

Still, it must be done. This is the age of self-marketing. Without it, it’s as if you don’t exist. It would be nice to be a genius who developed Ebay on my Macintosh when I was 12 years old for fun. I’m actually a 34 year old man with very little talent and there is an argument for low IQ. What can I actually do then?

Doing the Doing

What can I actually do then? I can get up at 5 am and start writing this blog. I can take near freezing cold showers and workout outside in the winter after a long days work. I can speak Japanese and I can program. I can improve myself. I’ve learned a lot of ways of motivating myself to do things I absolutely do not want to do. Including learning how to edit. Since I have nothing else, that is what I can share. How I motivated myself to get off the couch (or rather sit down on my lovely couch) and start throttling my brain until I learn something.

So I will be making 100 videos. 100 edited videos talking about what I’m doing to make my dreams come true. I’ll document every step. The goal being to help other 34 year old balding men get up and learn how to edit, or code, or wipe their ass with 1 sheet of toilet paper or whatever. Will that turn me into Martin Scorsese? Probably yes. While I wait for people to start throwing golden statues at my feet, I’ll keep cranking away. Even if no one watches and no one likes me, the status quo hasn’t changed at all.

Last year I spent 400 hours watching tv and another 400 playing video games. That’s why I’m poor and stupid. The goal right now isn’t to make money or even make 1 subscriber. It’s to do anything else besides sit, chew corn, and veg out. That’s not the game I want to play.

It will be extremely hard to make 100 videos. I really don’t want to do it. I feel nothing but dread thinking about do it, and nothing but panic when I ponder how to get started. I have no idea. Just like when I take a freezing cold shower in the middle of January however, there is nothing else to do but jump in.