If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance.
McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality”
While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.
Absolutely brutal indictment of algorithmic capitalism.
you're reading entirely too much into my pithy one-liner and probably a little too shallowly into what Squid Game was about. i don't even like the show and couldn't watch it past like two episodes because it was laying it on entirely too thick. if mr beast can't grasp the core message it was trying way too hard to ram down your throat enough to realize the folly of recreating it, with or without lethal consequences, then he's absolutely worthy of my scorn.
just to make it explicitly clear: using outsized monetary incentives to tempt people into doing demeaning and occasionally dangerous things they normally would refuse for the sake of profit and amusement under a system where basic needs and comfort are not guaranteed and in fact proportional to ones wealth and usually dependent on performing a lifetime of subservient labor for the same class offering those incentives is inherently exploitative and contemptible.
If society stopped pretending that they disliked violence, Mr beast would absolutely throw a rusty knife into a crowd of homeless people and tell them the survivor gets a million dollars.