Why I disappeared

You know, my only regret is that I didn't make an I'm quitting YouTube video. I could have gotten so many views. I figured since I haven't made a coffee montage here in a while, had to give the people what they wanted. Hey guys, it's Matt D'Avella and I'm not dead! I'm back! Making YouTube videos again! Uh, wow. Okay, so it's been a very long time since I've made a YouTube video here on this channel. Over eight months, in fact, which is definitely the longest time I've ever gone since making a video since I started back in 2017. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back. Uh, when I left, I was in a pretty dark place. And yeah, it just wasn't at the top of my priority list to make videos. And so in this video, I want to talk about why I stepped away, what happened then, what's been happening since, and what the future of this channel will be. I was talking to my brother recently, who's a pilot in the Air Force, and he was talking about how the fact that... When a plane crashes, it's rarely because of one thing. It's because multiple things go wrong at the same exact time. A storm rolls in, the fuel gauge breaks, air traffic control asks you about your flight path. Any one of these things at one time is manageable, but often when these things happen at the same time, that's when you run into issues. And that's kind of what happened to me. There were four main factors that led to my breakdown and from me stepping away from YouTube. First was adjusting to life as a new dad. That was probably one of the biggest ones. Second was feeling trapped by my business. Third was starting over in a new country. And fourth, if I'm being honest, was that I was just getting bored with my work. I was getting bored. making videos for youtube so i want to talk about each of these points and what was going on behind the scenes for me at the time starting with adjusting to life as a new dad so difficult time adjusting to life as a new dad. It was such a challenge to figure out how to reorganize my entire life around my new family. The responsibility and the pressure to do the right thing in every moment for him, for Nat, for my responsibilities at work, for myself, it was fucking hard. And it would have been difficult under the best of scenarios, but we had a fun little plot twist, which was the fact that our son did not sleep. For 10 months, he barely slept for one hour independently. And that meant split shifting the night with Nat. It meant countless nights of only getting two hours of sleep. It meant no energy for my workouts, no creative spark to make videos. Imagine the worst night of sleep that you've ever had in your life. Now imagine doing that every single night for 10 months straight and add in a fucking baby crying into the mix. I know that there are many parents watching this and many people who have struggled with sleep insomnia that don't have to imagine it. This is the reality that they're facing. or have faced, and they will tell you that it's absolute hell. By month 10, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this, both of us were completely broken. I was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, which if you look up online, you'll find that it's a common first diagnosis to depression, and it's often used because the word depression is often too loaded for most people, but I'm not afraid to use that word. I was fucking depressed. Period. And Nat was struggling too. She was diagnosed with PTSD, which can happen when you're woken up thousands of times in the middle of the night to a crying baby. We tried to be there for each other and we often gave each other what we didn't have and two things became very clear to us at that point. First, we needed to stop trying to save each other and try to save ourselves. And two, sleep. We needed our son to sleep so then we could sleep. That is the only way that we would be able to heal and move on from this. I don't want to get too much into the details here. I can save that for another video if you're interested in hearing about our sleep journey, although I will say Ferber for the win. But after months of trying every single sleep training method on the planet, we were able to get it under control. Frankie started sleeping independently through the night, and so did we. But unfortunately... It was already too late. I had been pushed too far, and there were other factors that were contributing to my plane basically nosediving. This airplane metaphor is fire, by the way. I don't care what you say. I think the fact that I said the word fire really shows how much of a dad I am. Yo, that's fire, dog. The second problem that I had was that for too long, I felt trapped by my business. One question that I've asked myself a lot over the years is, Are you doing it because you want to or because you feel like you have to? We often set out to achieve something big and it's filled with all sorts of excitement. All of this excitement in the beginning is great, but eventually it wanes and the lines blur between what you want to do and what you have to do. I've struggled with this off and on since making YouTube videos since 2017. But one thing that really dialed it up to 11 was when I started hiring employees. I've always wanted to build a creative team, work with others, create more ambitious projects, bigger videos, more videos. So I set out to do that. I hired my first full-time employee in 2019 and then the next in 2020 and then another and another and another. And at some point I log into our Google Meet to see nine people staring back at me looking for me. to guide them those kinds of expenses that kind of pressure is intense i basically managed to turn my fun filled full-time business into a jail cell albeit a fancy jail cell with a memory foam mattress and pour over coffee but Still, I heard Mark Rober talk about this on Colin and Samir's podcast not that long ago. He likened it to running on a treadmill. So you start out running really fast and it's all really exciting. You're hiring new employees. You're working on new and fun projects. You're getting a ton of dopamine. But eventually, you can't keep that pace going anymore. And that dopamine that comes from sprinting, hiring people, starting new projects, wears away. But... you still have to keep sprinting because your treadmill is going at that speed. You don't get the dopamine reward for the work that's going into it. At some point between employee one and employee 10, I started doing it for the money. And I want to be very clear, I did not do it to get rich. I was just trying to pay my expenses. I was actually making less money than I ever had on YouTube. I eventually decided to let go of my entire staff, an incredibly difficult and painful decision for everyone involved, but one that I had to make. I just couldn't. keep going anymore. And that meant for the first time in years, I had a choice. I didn't have to do it. And when I asked myself, do I really want to make this next video? The answer was no. The third challenge that I faced was starting over in a new country. While all of this was going on, Nat and I decided to pack our bags and move across the world to live in Australia. Now, I love Australia. I love Sydney. It's literally my favorite city that I've ever lived in. So I have absolutely zero complaints there. But this was just another layer of adjustment. I like to think that I'm a resilient person, but deep down I know that I'm a creature of habit. You probably know this about me if you've watched my videos for a while. I like systems. I like rules, routines. All of those things help to keep the wheels on for me. But when those things get disrupted, I have a hard time finding my... my rhythm. A new country meant new routines, new relationships, a new gym, a new way of doing things. Plus I have to say that living away from my family has been really difficult, especially now that we have a kid. Not only do we get less time with them throughout the year, but also selfishly, we get less support, which means that parenting becomes so much more difficult, especially for two people who are trying desperately to hold on to their careers. So yeah, that was just like an additional layer of complexity that made everything that much more challenging during this difficult period. The final thing that tipped me over the edge. I was getting bored making videos. For a long time, I forced myself to push on. I think I was chasing the feeling I had in the beginning, like back in 2008 when I started my freelance filmmaking business, or in 2017 when I uploaded my first YouTube video. I wanted that magic mix of excitement. and nervousness and energy and maybe even just like a little bit of anxiety. I made videos back then because I loved it, not because I was guaranteed a paycheck. But no matter what I tried, that feeling kept eluding me. I really think it was Just the momentum of the years of work that was carrying me forward. It was like a car rolling even after its engine stalled. I knew it was time for a change, and so I started asking myself the difficult questions that I had been avoiding. Was I excited about my work, like truly excited? Was I making videos because I wanted to? And the big one, was I happy? No, no, no. Those were three very quick no's for me once I faced. the truth. When I was younger, I was always proud of the fact that I was motivated by my passions, my interests, and my own personal contentment. When I made wedding and bar mitzvah videos back in the day, I did it because I wanted to, and I put everything I had into those projects. Suddenly, in my late 30s, I was faced with the realization that I wasn't living in alignment with those values. And while I had all the success and accolades that I could ever dream of, I don't think a younger version of myself would have been very proud of the decisions that I was making. It was almost as if a younger version of myself grabbed me by my charcoal shirt and shouted, if you're not happy, then stop. So I stopped and I immediately felt a weight release from my shoulders. Not all of it. I was still depressed as fuck, but it was a step in the right direction. Probably the funniest and most ironic part of this entire thing was that at the time I was working on a video called I lost all my motivation. This is so embarrassing. I can't even admit it. Oh my God. Okay. No, no. The video was, I lost all my motivation. Here's how I found it. I was so full of shit. At the time, I thought that I was onto something. I was like, oh yeah, I'm like getting into a rhythm. And like, then just one day, like everything fucking collapsed. And I was like, it was almost as if I was trying to fool myself. I was trying to trick myself into believing that I had figured it out. And I... gotten everything together. I remember sitting there looking at my video timeline. It was 90% complete. I was just a few hours away from completing it. All I had to do was sit in front of the camera, hit record and riff off a few lines, but I couldn't do it. That's when I made the call. I canceled all my brand deals for the year. I closed my laptop and I walked away. I didn't even make an I'm quitting YouTube video. I'm still upset about that one. And that was the start of my recovery of finding myself again and learning how to love life again. And that brings me to today and the future of this channel. I'm happy to say that I'm back. Like, back, back, back. I don't think I'm going to put this in the phone. This is so fucking lame. It's just a lot, you know? I think I just, like, I feel like, you know, I lost a part of myself. And, like, it feels good to be back. This towel was for sweat, but now it's for tears. It's okay to cry and shit. It's okay. I did not expect that. God. This is not, like, I'm not that kind of guy. Like, I'm not that kind of YouTuber. I'm not the YouTuber that fucking cries on camera. That's fucking lame, dude. I'm not doing that. Oh, where was I? Um, I guess what I was saying was, I'm back. i'm back because i'm ready to be back i'm back because i want to and i'm back because i'm excited about making videos again it was hard being away for so long and not just away from youtube and you know publishing content publicly but like like i'm a creator through and through like i just love making videos i love creating things and like i've really found that over the past year My mental health is deeply connected to my ability to create and like sometimes my ambition can be a detriment and kind of hurt me because like I'm very ambitious I want to work really hard and sometimes I stretch myself too thin but like taking a break from creating and from working was like like it helped for a bit but eventually like to regain a sense of self to regain my life back. I needed to start creating again. I don't have to make YouTube videos to feel full and to feel fulfilled, but I need to make something. I need to create. I need to feel that forward progress, and I need to feel like I'm building in my life. versus breaking down and and to a degree that's like a part of life part of life is like getting broken down especially as a parent and then just like trying to rebuild and and do your best to keep it all together even when everything is kind of crumbling around you but yeah it's good to be back it's good to be back talk about the fucking messy middle bro There are a few things you can expect from me going forward, including a couple fun new projects. First, I'm making videos regularly on this channel again. I've got lots of interviews and fun projects lined up with people that you might recognize, and I'll be unpacking a lot of the lessons that I've learned over the past year away from YouTube. Second, I started a short-form podcast that I launched this week called Three Rules. If you're an OG subscriber, you might remember the Ground Up show from back in the day. Well, this is... a very similar spirit to that show so basically the gist is every week i ask a guest to share three rules that help them find success or happiness my episode with ryan holiday is already live each episode of my new podcast is just 15 to 20 minutes long because the world doesn't need another two-hour self-development podcast. Number three, in my absence from making videos on this channel, I started another YouTube channel called Bonus D'Avella. If you like the occasional behind-the-scenes video or want to learn more about the things I'm doing as a solo creator, how I make my videos, what goes on behind the scenes, I even made a video how I set up this video, how I lit it. I've got two lights right here. You can see, boop, there's a little hair light. I don't know what I expected to happen. It's really an opportunity for me to express my creative energy with one of my biggest passions, which is creating and making videos. And so if you're into that stuff, that's where to go. Someone commented on a video there recently and said that bonus D is basically Matt D'Avella without ADHD meds. So yeah, I don't know if that's a compliment or not, but that's something that someone said about it. And finally, I've been keeping up a weekly newsletter for the past six months or so, which has been a great creative outlet for me to be able to talk about some of the things that I've been going through and also share some self-development advice for people who care to hear about it. If you want to check out any of these projects, the podcast, the YouTube channels, the newsletter, I've left links in the description below this video. Before I go, I just want to thank you. Thanks for supporting me from the beginning. Thanks for giving me the space to take this break. And thanks for sticking around for this next chapter. See you soon. And by the way, that's the last time I will ever cry in a YouTube video. That's the most cliche shit ever. Okay, that's it. I'm done.

My new podcast: @threerulespodcast
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Hi there 👋 My name is Matt. I made a documentary called Minimalism that trended on Netflix a few years back and now I make YouTube videos. Please subscribe so my mother-in-law thinks this is a better career than being a doctor.

Video Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:09 Coffee montage
00:37 Why I disappeared
02:30 Reason 1: Adjusting to life as a new dad
05:38 Reason 2: Feeling trapped by my business
07:57 Reason 3: Starting over in a new country
09:13 Reason 4: Getting bored with my work
12:13 Me totally not crying
14:52 What's next for me

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