Millennial Nobody
I joined YouTube in September of 2007.
Almost twenty years later, while I'm writing this, I only have four public videos to show for it. The most recent one is more than a decade old, from my music production days. There were more once, from my video production years, but they're now archived and irrelevant. Everything else is just history: thousands of hours of watching, liking, saving. Feels like I contributed almost nothing. Well, at least for myself. I'm sure I helped the algorithms.
Twenty years is long enough to want to understand what actually happened. So this is me looking back at the whole stretch, and at the name I finally gave what I'd been doing.
This one started as a video, recorded in one take. If you'd rather watch me say it:
Millennials are the before-and-after generation of the internet. We got pretty much a full childhood on one side of it and a full adulthood on the other. For me the line is almost surgical: twenty years back cuts my life in half just about.
I'm an elder millennial. I was in college when Facebook launched in 2004, and I didn't understand it. Mostly just the social part was foreign (but attractive). I was a couple of years into college, just getting started in web design, only recently learning the foundations of HTML and JavaScript. What I really didn't understand was what it would mean, or how to take advantage of it (and how it would take advantage of us). Hardly anyone did. The technical side I grew into: web design, then software, then a career built on it.
It was the social side I only half got, and that half never caught up.
What I did was file it away. Social media, vlogging, the early YouTubers talking into their webcams: I subconsciously put all of it in a category called attention seeking. And I grew up as someone who doesn't likes seeking attention. I couldn't have named that category back then. It's present me, looking back, who can see the filing happen, and see how incomplete my understanding of my own self was.
There was a layer under that filing decision that took even longer to see. I grew up believing work should speak for itself. Build something good and they will come. I never said that belief out loud, but it ran everything: promotion felt selfish, almost disingenuous. It wasn't that I thought I was above marketing. It's that things earlier in my life had taught me not to focus there. Some of that comes from where I grew up, a small town, and that's a story for another time. But it meant every "follow me for more" got filed as noise, and every chance to say "here's what I made" got filed as bragging. Fear was there as well.
The full picture is more nuanced though. I didn't just watch from the shadows, I participated. I joined Twitter around 2008, posted, interacted, picked up a bit of a following. I ran social media for some of the startups I worked at. I understood the machinery well enough to operate it for other people.
But for myself, I was half in, half out. I was always good at the starting and the building. I have a wake of unfinished projects behind me to prove it. What I couldn't do was the other half: putting myself out there, saying this is mine, come look. Every time it came to that, the hesitation kicked in, and I'd pull back to the edges. Like things. Save things. Present in the room, sitting against the wall.
A social media wallflower. And it wasn't a conscious decision, it was indecision. It was uncertainty, fear, and honestly sometimes just life.
I have a name for what twenty years of half in, half out has left me as: a millennial nobody.
I've been here the whole time, but nobody online knows me.
Nobody in visibility, not in value. My life is fulfilling and heading in the direction I want, just slower than I hoped. But the description fits, given how much of my work is online. And saying it plainly turned out to be the first honest step out of it.
A complex element of this is that the attention-seeking category wasn't completely wrong. A good part of what happens online is exactly that.
But a good part of it, the part that took me twenty years to see, is something else entirely: bids for connection. People saying, in whatever awkward format the platform allowed, here's who I am. Is anyone else out there?
I missed that completely. And while I was busy hedging, the world quietly moved. People are on their phones. People are are more at home. The kind of connection I kept waiting for, bumping into someone, scenes forming, serendipity doing its work, got scarce for everyone, not just for me.
I've worked fully remote for over nine years, and at least partly remote for over ten. It was a goal of mine to be location independent, and I'm grateful I got there. But I can be honest about the bill: co-located work produces friendships and colleagues as a side effect, and remote work produces scarce amounts. It shrinks your luck surface, the area where serendipity can land.
And I did try to make up the difference in person: Meetup groups, working from coffee shops, events and conventions. The attempts were real, just mostly inconsistent or cut short by other life factors. But even when I showed up, lasting relationships rarely formed (though a handful of strong ones did), and I don't think that was only my approach. The people I was meeting were also remote, also between things, also passing through. The instability isn't a personal failing as much as it is just how everyone is navigating now.
For a long time, I was wishing the world was different instead of accepting it as it is.
Part of what finally shrank the fear was noticing that performance and connection can misconstrued from the outside. Both are a person talking into a camera. The difference isn't the format, but the addressee.
Performance addresses an audience: the many, the abstract, the count at the bottom of the screen.
A bid addresses a person. One specific someone, even when the message happens to be broadcast.
And one-to-one or smaller groups is the mode I've always been most comfortable in: having in-depth conversations, exchanging ideas, getting to know someone and letting them know me. I never needed to become a different person to do this. I needed to catch a category error I made in 2004.
That's why the reframe matters. Half in, half out never worked because I couldn't get behind the reason for being there. I can get behind this one, with both feet.
Of course there's still fear in it. Rejection, looking foolish, or coming up short again are all still there. But I've done the math. My channel currently has 25 subscribers. The realistic failure mode of anything I post is silence, and silence is something already in the life I already have. Silence isn't always bad, sometimes it's golden. The floor of this bet is the status quo. The upside is more surface area for luck to land on, and at the minimum I get to stretch myself and grow into a better communicator.
So I'm not rebranding. No fresh start under a clever handle. The twenty-year-old channel with its four dusty public videos stays exactly as it is, because it's one of the most honest thing about me that exists online, an artifact of all those years.
There's one more reason to do this out loud. The voices that have helped me most these past few years have mostly been older men: clear-headed, grounded, talking plainly about real things. I don't think there are enough of them. I'm forty-something, twenty-or-so years into tech and life's ups and downs, and if I can add even one more of those voices, the awkwardness and effort is a fair price.
And this essay is the first real bid. It isn't addressed to an audience. It's addressed to one person, maybe you: another millennial nobody who grew into the technology, half understood the rest, and has been half in, half out ever since.
If any of this landed, let me know. That's how future friendships start.
