This Can’t Be Healthy for Anyone: Hitting a Million
In the past four days, a video I made in 15 minutes has been viewed about 8 million times.
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I’ve spent the past eight years simply trying to get in front of more people. Fame isn’t necessarily the goal, but when trying to make a career as a comedian, you do need to get people to watch your material. Part of that is getting on stage at many opportunities, part of it is late nights out at clubs, and part of it is posting relentlessly on social media.
Since 2020, I’ve been relentlessly posting across platforms. Most of my content has gone to TikTok, because I realized that the algorithm would inevitably get me in front of more people. When my first video hit over 100,000 views, I realized that I should start posting every day. Sometimes my videos were long and well thought out. I spent a lot of time doing multiple takes, scripting, and trying to nail shots. Most of the time, I would give short, quick hits. Some thoughts that I could fire off. Easy content. Cheap heat.
With the looming TikTok ban (and realizing that I should branch to other platforms), I inevitably started posting on Instagram. I began filming videos not just within TikTok, and I started posting on multiple platforms. Not every video got a crosspost, but any that I felt was worth the time, I did.
During Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIV halftime show, I grinned like a moron. “Euphoria” was my most listened to song from 2024, and having been a fan since good kid, m.A.A.d city, I was very excited to see what he’d do. While watching it, I thought the political commentary was great. It was a perfect public protest, while being one of the most exciting halftime shows in history. I was also excited to see how he’d take shots at Drake, and it was thrilling to see how he did that.
I also knew that not everyone would get it. A few days before the Super Bowl, I made a joke about Drake’s public humiliation while out to dinner with my family, and my dad didn’t get it. After the halftime show, I texted my dad “A minorrrrrrr,” and he didn’t get it. A friend who was at the same Super Bowl party as my parents pointed out that none of the parents there understood the halftime show. That night, I posted a screenshot of my text with my dad, while quote-tweeting one of Jared Freid’s posts about the halftime show.
The next morning, before I cracked down on job applications, reading, and writing, I filmed a short sketch. It was simply me, acting like I was talking on the phone to my mom, and explaining some of the deeper details from the Kendrick-Drake feud. I quickly filmed, edited, and posted, before my fiancée woke up.
Once she was up, I banged out a few job applications, read a little Hemingway, wrote some ideas for my book, and went to the grocery store. Later in the day, I started to realize that the video was doing well, but it wasn’t necessarily any better than other clips that had done well.
By the late afternoon/evening, I realized that the views were jumping up at an exponential rate. I really couldn’t keep up. I thought it would hit a million on TikTok, but as the numbers were jumping, I started to notice Instagram was catching up, and then all of a sudden it passed it.
As the video got 999,000 views, I went into the office to be with my fiancée when I hit the million. As stupid as it sounds, it was exciting to refresh the page and see that the video views had passed one million. The virtual odometer rolled over, and I had hit 1 million views. Nearly as quickly as I hit 1 million, the video hit 2 million before I fell asleep that night. By the time I woke up, it was at 3 million.
The video is at 6.4 million views on Instagram, as I write this. It’s at 1.5 million views on TikTok, and I’ve gotten thousands more followers based off of it. That doesn’t even account for the second and third parts to the series that I made (though those videos haven’t cracked a million views either).
Even though I’ve had excitement to hit the million views, I also can’t help but think that the visceral response to going viral can’t be healthy. My gut reaction was that I couldn’t focus on anything, because I was getting addicted to the dopamine rush that social media notifications give.
When I should’ve been doing job applications and perusing LinkedIn, I got hooked on refreshing Instagram and TikTok. Usually, I send a fair number of videos on TikTok to my fiancée, and we watch them before we go to bed at night. She laughed, because I’d only sent one while the video was blowing up.
I could not focus on anything while the notifications came in. Plus it was doubled, because I made the video a collaboration with Ugly Flamingos. Even as I write this, I’m tempted to run over to my phone each time my Apple Watch buzzes.
The worst part is that I’m already planning on following this formula. As a comic, you need eyes on what you make, and I noticed that even though certain things that weren’t following the same formula weren’t getting the same crazy amount of views, it was much more than it would’ve gotten without this boost. I unfortunately need to keep momentum, and I need to figure out how to unplug even more.