Streaming's Fee

Each stream has a psychological cost. This is something I've come to learn of sorts - and it explains various parts of this hobby and how it impacts people.

Consider how streaming works in its raw form. You start recording, and because it's live - everything that happens is public. If something happens during a stream, it's now public forever, basically. That alone brings a cost of its own - an anxiety that you'll reveal something like a password or personal details. With time though, that fades until it's barely a worry. The real part is the fact that streaming is a performance for entertainment - and anytime you are an entertainer, you have a clear and open weakness - the idea that you didn't entertain enough.

This cost applies on every stream, and even if it gets easier to deal with experience, you'll always have to wrangle with it. It's subtle too - you might not even notice it. For me, this registers as a sort of feeling of emptiness that comes for me when I'm done with a stream. It's a distinct feeling of noticeable unsatisfaction - there's some frustration there. And if I force myself to think on this feeling, I'm eventually confronted with the thought that the stream sucked. I could've done something better, I screwed up, whatever - any small error gets cashed in at the end into that cost. Since there's no such thing as a perfect stream, this'll happen every time - and soon you might even grow more sensitive, catching significantly more errors, giving them far more importance, and it only makes the cost worse. The bigger you are, the deeper the wound this leaves - and though you can trick yourself into thinking you're ignoring it, it'll always bubble up in some way - maybe wanting to shake up your formula, streaming different things, try different gimmicks, layouts, whatever. But it'll always stay there.

The best way I found of dealing with it? Rejecting it. Of course sometimes you need to actually improve - but this feeling comes from an internal perfectionist that'll never be satisfied. Just reject it. After all this is supposed to be a hobby. If you're treating it as a job though - you must then find the perfect balance between knowing what needs an improvement and what's just a perfectionist's whining. If you don't, then the best case scenario is that you stagnate. The worst case scenario is that you give into this feeling, and slowly stretch yourself over where it takes you. It'll leave you obsessed about the metrics - because soon they'll become the only quantifiable way of measuring how good a stream is. And from there, the road is pretty obvious. That's how streamers "corrupt". There's probably a more descriptive way of putting it, but I don't exactly want to list off examples and I think it's pretty clear.

How's this for a twist though? Maybe all of this is just me trying to find some justification for the feeling I get at the end of each stream. Maybe all of this is a hallucination from my attempt to find a cause. So take all of it with a grain of salt.