Make Everyone Jealous
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Your Incredible Life Makes Incredible Content
Cruising in Croatia
My partner and I have always dreamt of living aboard a sailboat, and we talk about the dream a lot more often these days. Norbert was raised as a “boat kid” on a small monohull that he shared with his parents and several pets. During my childhood, my weekends were spent at the marina and summer vacations were spent sailing with my father, who was a boat captain.
To fuel my daydreaming, I turned to YouTube where I found many vloggers documenting their liveaboard journeys as they explore the seven seas. Most of them seem to be funding their travels through their YouTube and Patreon pages, where patrons pay per video.
I can see the logic. When you’re doing something as unusual as living aboard a sailboat, it makes sense to share the experience with others. And when you drop out of the 9-5 rat race, you need to get creative about income. The internet provides endless opportunity for both. And while I was quickly hooked on these videos, the impulse to cash in on one’s personal life gives me hives. Is it still possible to do something extraordinary without capitalizing off it on social media?
I’m always thinking about what’s happening when the cameras are off. Yes, it looks like these vloggers are always anchored in a deserted beachy atoll, but be sure that they aren’t getting Wi-Fi out there, meaning they probably have to go searching for it in less picturesque places. Watching a sequence of one woman doing yoga on a catamaran blew my mind; the sequence was shot from at least six different angles, and given that they’re only two people on board, this means that it must have taken several “takes” in order to get all the shots perfectly executed. Hey, if it pays the bills…
“I hope not all liveaboards are YouTubers,” I told Norbert. I shudder as I imagine a whole fleet of sailors with GoPros wielded at every occasion and drones buzzing overhead. That’s not the kind of liveaboard community that either of us are envisioning. When Norbert was a liveaboard, there was little way to communicate with the world beyond the tightknit sailing community. Thirty years later, we’re at the other extreme—communication overload!
Many of these liveaboard vlogging families have kids, and I wonder what it’s like to be a child star of your family’s own YouTube channel. We don’t know the effects that this obsession with performing will have on children in the long run, basically because they’re participating in an experiment (that they may be too young to understand or give consent). One video had as a title, “OUR BABY STOPPED BREATHING,” which made me cringe. Turning a scary medical situation into clickbait? That goes a bit too far for me.
I recognize that these videos are edited products that require a lot of time and effort to create; they’re not simply waving a GoPro around willy-nilly. And I’m sure there are plenty of things that vloggers keep private and don’t share with the world. But still, I made Norbert promise that we wouldn’t go that route if we end up living on a sailboat one day. “If we have to sell the content of our lives to make it work, then I’d rather not do it,” I said, and thankfully, he agreed.
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