#oneaday Day 864: White girl YouTubers

My wife watches a lot of "white girl YouTubers", and they annoy me. I've been trying to determine exactly why they annoy me, because it annoys me that they annoy me so much — and also I don't want to be unfair to my wife when she puts up with me watching Gawr Gura in the bath and Amelia Watson talking nonsense.

I think my main issue with them is just that there seems to be very little actual creativity on display.

There's one channel she watches where the gist of things appears to be "I'm pregnant, and this is my boyfriend", and hundreds of thousands of people watch those videos. Another has a British girl eating toast who I can't help feeling sorry for, because her family almost certainly hate her for constantly having a camera on while she's doing inane bullshit. And another starts every video promising a "very exciting video" before spending half an hour talking about three pairs of not very interesting trousers.

Vlogging has been a thing for a while, of course, so I can't get too mad about that side of things. (Although the "very exciting video" woman is genuinely excruciating to listen to.) What I do genuinely get annoyed about, though, is the number of videos that fall into one of the following categories:

• 5 Minute Crafts is a Terrible YouTube Channel, Let's Give Them Exposure by Watching Their Videos and Laughing At Them

• I Only Ate One Type of Food For a Week in the Mistaken Assumption That Someone Would Find It Interesting

• I Watched a TikTok Video That Did Well, So I'm Doing It in a YouTube Video to Try and Get Some of That Sweet Viral Attention

• I Hate Everything, So Let's Watch a Video About Something I Hate and Laugh At It

• Someone Said Something Mildly Stupid on Twitter and/or Instagram, so Here's a 40-Minute Video Explaining What an Awful Person They Are

And what compounds the problem is that all of these videos are inevitably edited with the same annoying memes that every vaguely large YouTuber uses — the Spongebob "Three Hours Later" cards; the use of Kevin MacLeod's Local Forecast, officially the most overused piece of music in existence; the use of the X-Files theme for something vaguely "mysterious" (that actually isn't mysterious); the use of Wii music to show "lol we r nerdy".

I get that certain things are popular and seem to "work" for the YouTube algorithm, but I find it mentally exhausting to see and hear the same things over and over from myriad different "content creators". And that really is what they're doing; they're churning out mindless "content" that will be forgotten about within a day, rather than doing anything that has been created with leaving any sort of lasting impact in mind — or, indeed, with any sort of individuality about it.

That doesn't sit right with me. We're better than that. At least we should be.