MrBeast

Hear me out!

Source: YouTube

Last week I was mindlessly scrolling YouTube when the algorithm served me a video I can’t stop thinking about. It was from MrBeast.

I suspect you either have no idea who MrBeast is, or you have a Very Strong Feeling about him.

If it’s the latter I bet that Strong Feeling is one of the following:

• You love him, think he’s a genius. The absolute GOAT.

• You hate him with all your heart. In fact, you’re drafting a thinkpiece in your head right now about how much you hate him.

• You embrace him with gratitude because, hey, he’s keeping your kid occupied on YouTube and, at least for now, his content is delaying your son’s plunge into the dark web.

MrBeast is the most popular YouTuber in the world. As of this writing he has 445 million subscribers. (That number is sure to change because he gets an average of 333k new subs a day.)

He stages elaborate stunts like “100 Kids versus the World’s Strongest Man!” and “7 Days Stranded at Sea.”

He’s also known for his giveaways in which he offers massive sums of cash to contestants who, say, last thirty days chained to their ex. Or survive one hundred days in prison.

People feel all sorts of ways about him. Is he the world’s most generous man? Or a modern day Willy Wonka? Both?

But I’m actually not here to rehash the various critiques levied against him, however valid or invalid they may be, because the video of his I want to tell you about isn’t one of his typical uploads.

Published on October 4, 2025, this video shows a young MrBeast—whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson—addressing the camera on October 4, 2015.

“Hi me in ten years,” he begins. “I’m gonna schedule upload this video ten years in the future.”

Now, I don’t subscribe to his channel and I don’t follow him on social media, but as a scholar of the zeitgeist (read: scroller of YouTube) I’m familiar with this work, so seeing a young version of a recognizable adult face still gave me that cool time capsule sensation.

At the time of the recording he was in high school. It was the night before a history test. A test, he says, he should be studying for instead of making this video. He whips the camera around to show his subscriber count: 8,726.

“Dude,” he says near the beginning, “if I don’t have a million subscribers when you see this video, my entire life has been a failure.”

It is said as both a preemptive lament and an incantation.

He goes on to mention his subscriber goal eight more times. By contrast, he considers the possibility of his death only twice.

Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve been struggling with my relationship to digital metrics recently. “Recently.” Lol. This isn’t new. Ever since I’ve been making work on digital platforms I have lived and died by numbers. There’s nothing complicated about it. It’s primitive, actually: big number make me happy, small number make me sad.

I am humiliatingly aware of fluctuating follower counts. Without looking them up, I can tell you my three most liked Instagram posts, and three that tanked. In my heyday of content creation I would spiral if a video underperformed and vibrate with manic ecstasy when a video went viral.

What I hate most, though, is how this hyperawareness of metrics has shaped my work. I’ve abandoned projects in the ideation phase because I feared they wouldn’t be popular. I’ve believed a piece of writing to be bad because it didn’t elicit the likes I was hoping it would. For over a decade I’ve been taking quantitative data and internalizing it as qualitative authority. As much as I’d like to believe in the independent spirit of my creative compass, I know that it is calibrated, at least in part, by notifications.

(My switch over to Substack was an attempt to escape this dynamic, but, like a horror movie where the protagonist finds safe harbor in yet another haunted house, I’ve come to realize that Substack is just another form of social media. One of its founders finally acknowledged this explicitly a few weeks ago. It has been… hard!)

As a member of polite society, though, I know to keep this private. It is gauche to discuss metric awareness. I’ve learned to wave away numbers as something I don’t pay attention to, a silly distraction that real artists don’t bother with. This is perhaps why it felt so refreshing to see a young YouTuber-in-training thirst for a million subscribers so openly. He was just saying the quiet part out loud.

The lingering aftertaste from this video, though, isn’t how impressively MrBeast surpassed his subscriber goal, but the awareness of how many other kids are out there just like him. Kids who skip studying for their history test to dream of their own content empire. Kids who, like Donaldson, believe that if they don’t meet their million-subscriber goal their entire life will be a “failure,” but who, unlike Donaldson, will never reach it. Kids who are not kids at all, but adults desperate to escape the trap of determining self-worth from numbers, wondering what kind of work they might create, who they might be, if they can successfully shed the shackles of metrics.

---