The year was 2016. It was a new year, and I was trying to make some new year’s resolutions to try and shake me out of the monotony that was my life at that moment. I had been working as a System Admin for 4 years at my current job at that point. Keeping the servers running and fixing every Mac issue under the sun for a bunch of Newspaper Reporters got very boring, very fast. At that point I decided to try a new hobby, Live Streaming on Twitch. Twitch was new at the time and was starting to gain a lot of traction socially.
For me, a life long gamer, Twitch felt like a very natural social network for me to spend my time on. I could learn about new games, watch them being played to see if I’d enjoy them before buying them, plus I got to ask questions of the streamer and they would most always respond with pretty cool insights about what they were playing. I was always willing to try new things, so I decided that maybe I could be a Live Streamer. I researched for hours how to setup Streaming Software. I researched Microphones and Audio Engineering and how the successful streamers of the day did it and emulated a lot of their tips and tricks of the streaming industry.
I had come up with the name DrTechMD, Tech has been in my DNA since I was 4 years old, and at one point I wanted to become a Doctor, but decided to go fix computers instead of Medical School probably because I did want to pay for it the rest of my life. So with a username that defined who I both was and could have been, I started live Streaming on Twitch 3 Nights a week.
It was definitely fun. It was like having your friends come over to your house to hang, without needing to actually be in your house. They could be friends from all over the world, and it provided connection for me to people I would have never met otherwise, considering how much of an Introvert I am and how much I don’t travel around the world anymore.
I ravished any advice I could to make my stream better. I’d network during the day at my brain dead job trying to get as many people as I could to visit me when I went live. I used ALL the current tech tools available to me to give me an upper hand. It was my one true advantage, leveraging bleeding edge tech to get as many people to follow me and watch me as I could.
I made some great connections in the industry. I was even given an Item in a Game one time that would send a Server wide message to everyone online in the game I was playing at that time: “Come check out DrTechMD on Twitch for a Free Flying Mount Giveaway”. In 5 minutes I had 500 people in my stream interacting with me. It was a crazy ride. Eventually I made Twitch Partner, something only 1% of all Live Streamers on the platform achieve. You would be thinking now that that would be a great start to a an awesome career, just like TimtheTatman or DrDisrespect.
Alas, twas not. After gaining Twitch Partner, whatever motivation I had previously had left me. I had already proven to myself I could be a successful. Still working 50 Hours a Week, making a 2 hour Daily Commute with traffic, an a wife struggling to take care of our 3 Kids under 6, it all just became too much. I was also severely overweight and in bad health, so I decided the best thing to do was move on and pay attention to myself and my family more. It was a good decision, it was the decision I needed to make at the time. I made a lot of life long friends on the way, but most followers and social media only friends quickly forget about you when you don’t show up on your feeds anymore. I can count on one hand how many people have checked in with me from those live streaming days in the past 6 years since I stopped streaming consistently. It’s terribly sad, mostly because I’m pretty lonely, and not having that Digital Out like I did before, it weighs pretty heavy on my mind sometimes.
I think it’s what a lot of Social Media Personalities go through when they start becoming irrelevant. It’s a big reason why you see these Influencers doing crazier and riskier things later on in their careers, that loss of their previous viral attention fuels them to try bigger pranks, buy fake engagement or start an Only—Fans.
I’m not writing this for attention now. I’m writing it for connection. Sure, attention is always a nice byproduct, but I’ve always lived in the background my entire life, much like most of you do. I like personal interactions, connecting the dots for others and solving problems more than I like standing up and making a fool of myself trying to get everyone to pay attention to me all the time. I like trying to discover the potential in others and helping them realize it themselves than I do trying to make myself more pleasing for the spotlight.
If any of this story resonates with you, reply or leave a comment but know that no matter how much you ignore me, I will never be desperate enough to start an Only—Fans…Trust me, you wouldn’t want me to anyways…
Til’ Next Week