YouTube is a lie—not because videos aren’t real, but because the incentives are fake. The platform trains you to optimize for everyone except yourself. Clicks. Thumbnails. Retention curves. Facial expressions engineered like lab rats chasing pellets. The moment you start “doing YouTube,” you stop telling the truth. You start negotiating with an algorithm that does not love you, does not care about you, and will replace you the moment your dopamine output drops.
The biggest lie is that YouTube rewards authenticity. It doesn’t. It rewards consistency of spectacle. It rewards familiarity over originality, safety over danger, polish over soul. The algorithm doesn’t want your raw idea—it wants a predictable version of what already worked last week. And if you comply long enough, you wake up one day realizing you’ve become a character in your own life, performing instead of living.
Another lie: scale equals success. A million subscribers who don’t know you is not power—it’s noise. Real power is sovereignty. Being able to say whatever the hell you want without fear of demonetization, shadow bans, or audience revolt. YouTube turns creators into digital sharecroppers. You build the house, they own the land. One policy update and your livelihood evaporates.
YouTube also lies about time. It convinces you that speed matters more than depth. That daily uploads beat decade-long thinking. That reaction beats creation. The result? A culture of fast-food ideas: spicy, addictive, forgettable. Nobody remembers the tenth “hot take.” People remember the one dangerous thought that changed how they see the world.
The most corrosive lie is that YouTube is necessary. It isn’t. You don’t need permission to publish. You don’t need an audience to think. You don’t need virality to matter. History was shaped by books, letters, conversations, silence, long walks, and people who didn’t care about metrics. Great ideas grow slowly, like muscle. Algorithms hate slow growth because it can’t be controlled.
Use YouTube if you want—but never let it use you. Treat it like a distribution channel, not a judge. A megaphone, not a mirror. The moment you feel yourself adjusting your thoughts to please strangers, shut it off. Lift something heavy. Write something true. Publish on your own terms.
Truth is heavy. Lies are light. That’s why YouTube floats—and why real thinkers sink deep.
And down there, below the algorithm, is where freedom lives.