 Four and a half years ago, I sat in the 4th Universalist Society in the City of New York Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side listening to a guest minister, sermonize about something. I don't remember exactly what, but a spark in it turned into a full-on Jimmy Neutron brain blast, and I left the pew that Sunday with the week air review fully formed in my mind. Less than two months later, I posted its first week of four videos and then just kept going. And for a while, that was exciting. I was doing something new, indifferent, experimenting with styles and subjects, and I more or less kept to the schedule promised by its name for two years, after which point it became an ever-present reminder of my youthful naivete. A lot has changed in the world since August 2018, and it feels like a lot has changed in me, but very little has changed for me. I work at the same place in an unfortunately more taxing version of the same job. I'm in the same relationship. I live in a nicer one-bedroom apartment, but I could walk to my old one on a whim, and it's still small enough that Piece of Cake Moving Company thinks it's a studio. That feeling of stagnation extends to my artistic endeavors. I'm definitely a better writer now than I was four years ago, and hopefully I'm a better creative all around. I have made way too many mistakes to not have learned from any of them, but at the same time, I haven't really done too much beyond YouTube, and on it I feel like I have hit diminishing returns. The reality is I figured out the correct way to do a The Week I Review video years ago. The thing that I had envisioned was largely perfected in like 2020, and the only way to meaningfully improve has been to just do something else. My best videos are the ones that break the formula. I can't see Hamilton, Thoughts of a Colored Man, the one where I bought a $500 t-shirt, but I can't do those very often. And while cinematic cold opens on otherwise standard videos are a nice opportunity to flex my creative muscles, the rest of production is more of a hassle than anything else, and post straight-up sucks. It's no longer a matter of effort, but time. And not time particularly well spent. Regular viewers have probably noticed that these supplemental edits in my videos become fewer and further between as they go on because I edit sequentially and I become less and less invested in a video the longer I stand right there staring at my Premiere timeline. In the beginning, I'll add everything that seems relevant, but by the end, nah. And why should I? Each additional edit does very little for the overall video, and no one has ever come to this channel to see things fly in and out over my shoulders. But I can't avoid it entirely. The presence of editing matters even if any given edit does not, so I find myself in the same position as anyone who has done this for years. This is why the first hire that every successful YouTuber makes is an editor. Would I be making this video in an alternate world where I could afford an editor? Maybe not. Though in that hypothetical, there would be a lot more riding on the decision of whether or not I stopped doing this. In our current reality, very little is. Maybe even nothing. The weak air view doesn't matter in the sense that ending it isn't going to put me on the street. I'm not going to starve or lose my health care. Nothing will materially change because this was never my job. Between all of the various sources of tour-related income, I make the annual equivalent of about a month's rent, maybe two in a good year. Which is to say that the channel pays for itself and the occasional week of groceries. Now, if I didn't live in Manhattan, the same amount of money would go further. But if I didn't live in Manhattan, the channel would have never existed in the first place. And let's be honest, it still wouldn't have gone very far. The money has been important psychologically though, particularly on Patreon where dozens of people have at various points over the years offered financial support. And it sounds cliche to say that every dollar counts. It's also like a lie considering what I just said. But it actually does. Every dollar is a signal that a person, not some aggregate accounting of algorithmically assigned actions, but a real human being believes that my work has literal value. It means the world to me, honestly. And if it weren't for them, I would have stopped doing the weak air view a long time ago. But their support isn't enough to tip the cosmic scales anymore. So I will be shutting the Patreon down at the start of the new year. Though hopefully not the little community that's built up around it and the live streams that eventually moved over to Discord. It's not nearly as busy as it was a year or even six months ago, but I'm going to keep that server running for as long as people continue to show up. I genuinely like the folks on there, a whole bunch of whom came to see me in London. Which was amazing. It's one of the best days of my life. And perhaps the end was inevitable given that fact. The Anthropocene Reviewed Reviewed presented a problem to me as the creator of the weak air review. I had not really joked that it would be a very appropriate series finale. And someone else said, well, it could be more of an Avengers Endgame. The end of an era, an event whose effects would be felt in every subsequent entry. And it turns out that was kind of prescient because much like Marvel's Phase 4, I think the weak air review has become particularly unfocused and frankly kind of empty in its wake. I put so much of myself into that show and also into this channel over the years. It feels like there's just not a lot left of me that's new. I've only got so many stories to tell, so much insight to share. I think I've repeated myself a lot in this video. It feels like I've hit my limit. Or I'm just depressed. That's a joke. Of course I am. I hate saying it because it means people in my actual life and my parents in particular are going to want to talk to me about that and talk to me about talking to someone about that. And that's going to be a whole fucking thing, but it's impossible to pretend that that's not a factor in this. I lost the spark or whatever it was that was really keeping me going for this long. It has been hard to even write recently, let alone shoot and edit. I can point to specific events or things that definitely made it worse, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm just fucking like existentially tired. And it's not only my head that's in a rough spot. Everything hurts and in ways that have taken me far too long to accept. Right now, sitting here, I have aches in my back, knees, wrists, and this fucking elbow I got a referral to go see someone about in March of 2020 because it was in that much pain then and it's only gotten worse since and I still haven't seen someone about it. I need to take care of myself and I'm hoping that removing YouTube from my life officially will help me do that. I don't know, but I'm hoping. That all being said, this video isn't the end. I'm not going out on a downer. I'm going to go out with a banger. So here's the plan. I will be making five more videos between December and probably like April, maybe sooner or hopefully not later, we'll see. The next three are ones I promised specific people earlier this year. Tom Ford's 2016 film Nocturnal Animals for Mr. Jolly Hough, Shaefer the Dark Lord's 2013 album The Sick Passenger for number one week air review Superfan Willow, and Kate Barrett's 2020 game Potter Game for actual person I've met in real life, Garth. After those, I'll hit you with a deeply personal video about a medical procedure that I underwent about a month ago that won't be confirmed complete until the end of January. And then the true series finale of the week air review. My 10 out of 10 take on everything everywhere all at once. The best movie. It's the most appropriate note to end on after I decided to not end it on the most appropriate note. So I'm going to pull out all the stops. I have big plans for that video, not in terms of length, but style. I may actually need some help with it. So if you're in the New York area and would be interested in helping somehow, let me know. I hope it lives up to the ambitions. So this isn't goodbye quite yet, though I don't know what if anything comes after. There's a chance I pick up live streaming again at some point now that the weather's fucking cold. And maybe I'll keep that going after. Maybe I'll return with the occasional short since those are pretty easy and disconnected from what I think of as like the show. Maybe I'll start a newsletter or get back to work on music or write a short film or stand-up set. Maybe I'll do all of those things or none of them. Maybe I'll just let myself rest while I figure out what I actually want to do. And maybe that will involve coming back to YouTube and earnest at some point down the road and trying this all again. I don't know. And that's okay.