The Center Cannot Hold
"I'm a Product That I've Created"
In my writing class this week, the instructor assigned us to read Joni Tevis’ essay “Something Like the Fire," about Liberace. I was struck by this quote of his:
“I’m a product that I’ve created.”
A few years ago, I started following Sailing La Vagabonde, the YouTube channel of a couple living aboard a sailboat, Elayna Carausu and Riley Whitelum. It was the early days of the pandemic and we had a newborn, so you can understand the impulse to search for an escape. In July 2020, I wrote about how unsavory I found their choice of making money off of their lives. I wouldn’t want that for myself or my family.
Over the years, my judgmental attitude towards the couple has mellowed as I have continued to loosely follow their journey across multiple ocean crossings and continent hopping. They have two small children now and, while I appreciate the sailing porn and epic tropical destinations, more than anything I appreciate their honesty when it comes to the challenges of documenting their lives for an international fan base.
As a mother of two littles myself, I can relate to the sleep deprivation and chaos, although my life is nowhere near as dynamic as theirs. While I rarely drive 25 minutes to the next town with my kiddos, Elayna and Riley schlep their toddlers across continents and oceans. While I do everything in my power to keep our life as unexciting and routine as possible, their YouTube channel and the treadmill of content creation mean that they must always be chasing the next adventure. I have watched as they make different attempts to maintain their sailing vlogging lifestyle while raising a young family, and I have wondered when it was all going to implode.
Two weeks ago, Elayna and Riley released a video titled “Burnout – I really don’t know if we can go on.”
In the first frame, a tear-stained Elayna sits on a sofa while Riley speaks from behind the camera. “Is this a bad time to film?” he asks. “The worst,” Elayna replies, looking truly bereft. Riley goes on to explain that they’ve just spent the past several hours talking about their work and YouTube. “We’ve been living for our channel for the last 9 years,” Riley says. One upload a week – 399 uploads. During that time, they’ve only skipped two videos.
When I first started watching Sailing La Vagabonde, Norbert and I went back to the beginning and started watching their videos from the very start of their channel in 2015. In the beginning, it was just the two of them on a scrappy monohull in Europe, young and in love (without a whole lot of sailing know-how). Their videos had the humorous element that they still have, without any of the polished tricks that they now employ. Since then, they have updated their equipment, upgraded their sailboat, and started a family. They also started a side business chartering their old catamaran and receive financial support from a host of sponsors, whose products they advertise in their videos. I just bought Elayna’s children’s book online. They have 1.84 million subscribers and who knows how many paying members on Patreon. For all intents and purposes, they are thriving.
And yet, here we are, watching a very sad Elayna explaining the reason for her tears.
“It is our lives that we’re filming, but I just don’t want to live for our channel anymore. I just want to live for me and that’s hard because we’ve turned our job into our lives and our lives into our job. And I don’t think we can separate that. I’m exhausted.”
In speaking these words, Elayna is sharing her deep dissatisfaction with the choices they have made. I watch her speak these hard truths from the depths of her soul and my heart breaks.
Elayna and Riley go on to share that Elayna has been experiencing uncontrollable crying, panic attacks, trembling, severe anxiety and uncharacteristic depression.
“The camera and the laptop became a trigger for me,” Elayna admits. She didn’t want to be on camera and she experienced anxiety from just opening her laptop. “I started to feel completely overwhelmed and physically sick. I was in a pretty dark place.”
They responded by removing devices and any responsibilities from her shoulders, including filming and being on film.
Later, Elayna addresses the camera one last time before “switching off”: “I’ve been running on adrenaline. I don’t know how I was able to do all that I was doing. It was nonstop. I was always on, not living in the present enough.”
In order to get better and find healing, Elayna heads to a wellness retreat in Bali (they’re in Indonesia currently) and dives deep into self-care: meditation, yoga, breath work, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and bloodwork (where they discover high levels of toxicity in her system). Later on, she reports back at the end of her journey and talks about how she had burned out her spare battery and was suffering from chronic stress. But after taking time away from work (at the retreat and for several weeks afterwards), she has some important takeaways. “I’m going to have to separate myself from work,” she says. “I’m always going to put my health first.” She has come to the realization that “stress really can kill you” and she will be making certain accommodations so that her health doesn’t suffer.
Riley weighs in and talks about the silver lining of this mental health crisis: “If Elayna can let go more, and let videos not quite as good, we’ll be more relaxed and the videos will be better. Ultimately it will be a god thing for you guys and especially for us. I know for sure that Elayna will be rejuvenated and ready to get back into things again.”
In the essay about Liberace, there’s another quote in which he says, near the end of his life: “I discovered that you have to draw the line between the performer and the person.”
I think that is the tough lesson that Elayna and Riley are grappling with here. It’s a fine line to walk when your life is your work, and vice versa. I know there is nothing new about content creator burnout. Last year, I interviewed Josh Harmon, a YouTube star (and Amherst alum), about his experience with mental health and he said that it was essential that he take several months off a year in order to find balance. He looked at his content creation in terms of “seasons,” the way that television shows don’t run year-round. There needs to be a fallow season in order to rest and recuperate, so that one can have the energy to be creative and productive when the time comes.
Something that Elayna said struck me: “We are normal people.” It’s true. Even though they are YouTube stars, they are subject to the same vulnerabilities as the rest of us mortals. But also, I want to challenge this notion that the life Elayna and Riley are leading is “normal.” In a world where many middle schoolers have their own YouTube or TikTok channels, we forget that YouTube was started less than 20 years ago.
There is no historical precedent for the modern phenomenon of documenting your life for the entertainment of others. People like Elayna and Riley—and their children—are essentially guinea pigs. All this may seem normal, but it’s just the water we are swimming in.
I’m glad that Elayna is doing better. I sincerely want the best for their family. And yet, I can’t help wondering if anything they do will change the heart of the problem: having turned their job into their lives and their lives into their job.
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I always say that the moment we won't have electricity/internet, and that time is much closer than most people would like to believe, we're going to see throngs of people, both adult and young, jumping off from rooftops because they've never known or were taught how to fill the empty vessel by bucolic means.
I had so hoped that Elayna’s takeaway was that they should just stop doing it. The endless cycle of content creation seems like a trap impossible to get out of. The fact that they’re continuing to create content rather than just throwing in the towel reads is evidence of this toxic relationship.