Returning After a 10-Month Creative Rut
I had been in such a creative rut this year.
Last year, I published 11 videos on my YouTube channel. It may not seem like a lot, but I make videos on YouTube for fun as a creative, not for a living—it’s where I channel my creativity (pun unintended).
The kind of videos I make are also very complex and in-depth and so each can take quite a lot of time and energy. Plus, I also have a full-time job.
This year, I’ve only made 1 video so far, and that was in January (we are now at the end of October).
At the end of 2024, I started to feel burnt out with making videos because, in the span of a few months, I churned out multiple videos that took a lot of effort to produce, which included videos where I tested Macs for music production, a high-end ergonomic chairs comparison, and a desk makeover video.
For example, to make the desk makeover video, I actually had to completely overhaul so many things in my studio. That alone took me an entire day.
I felt a strong drive while I was making those videos, but as 2025 rolled around. I started to lose steam.
And then Trump started making talks about annexing Canada.
The idea that Canada—a country I love dearly, a place where I call home—may lose sovereignty really shocked me. It gave me an existential crisis that I had never experienced before. I was left with a restless and anxious feeling for several months.
It made everything in life—my job, my channel—feel extremely unimportant and futile. And so I completely lost the motivation and interest to make more videos for fun.
What’s the point of making these silly videos if we might need to flee for our lives, I would sometimes wonder at the time.
And around the same time, the Buy Canadian movement was gaining movement. Many Canadians were boycotting products from the US. And so making videos talking about American tech (Apple) on an American platform (YouTube), thereby making profits for the same platform that hasn’t put creators’ interest at heart for a long time just felt demoralizing.
And so I just stopped making videos for YouTube.
Honestly, I had a fun and liberating video-free 10 months. I didn’t have to constantly be thinking about what the next videos might be, to spend a few weeks just trying to make a Mac testing video as fast as possible once a new Mac is announced, or to look at video analytics to feel some validation of all the time and effort I put into a video.
There were times when I wasn’t sure if I would ever return to YouTube at all.
But at the same time, I also missed the feeling of being a creative—spending unnecessary time and effort on making pretty motion graphics (the animation curve needs to be just right) and publishing work that I’m proud of for the world to see.
I also saw how many people left wonderful comments on my videos and even on other online forums like Reddit saying how much my videos helped them choose a Mac that gave them the most out of their budget.
It reminded me that making videos on YouTube is not just for me; I’m also making some contributions to society and leaving some good information on the internet. As infinitesimal as my contributions may be, if I get to help someone out there, I’m happy.
So when Apple announced the M5 MacBook Pro, I decided to use this opportunity to jump back into Youtub’ing.
So far, I’m having fun! But one thing I don’t miss is how bad I am with a teleprompter. You would think it’s easy to just read off a script, but I don’t know why—it’s very challenging for me. I stumble so much and the way I speak with a teleprompter never resembles how I normally speak. My wife says I always sound so stilted in my videos and I agree.
Editing the video is always my favourite part because I love Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion. It’s just so fun and working in the magnetic timeline just really scratches some kind of itch in my brain.
As I’m editing the new video after a 10-month hiatus, I still don’t feel as pumped up as last year. The fact that I took a break from making the video to write this post is clear evidence—last year, once I had a video in progress, I would pretty much spend every waking moment working on it because I was that obsessed.
While I don’t know what this means exactly in terms of a full return to YouTube, maybe it’s a good thing to not be so obsessed and hyper-focused. Maybe I burnt out because my flame was burning too strong and what I was doing wasn’t sustainable.
Whatever the answer is, I’m sure I will find out, just as I always do. Until then, back to the timeline!
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