Workaholic’s Anonymous: My Addiction to Streaming

Anne Munition
Anne Munition
Published in
7 min readDec 8, 2017

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“What do you do besides stream?”

I stared at the question in my chat. Mid-round of attacking King’s Row, my brain blanked for a second as I silently read the question to myself and came up with… nothing. Unwilling to be distracted from my part in our team’s attack, I brushed the question off for something easier to consider.

“What DO I do besides stream…” I asked myself later that night. When I first got started streaming, I lived near my college friends and would go out with them to bars or shows. I had a full-time job that got me out of the house and a rock climbing gym membership that I dedicated a few hours a week to.

Then I moved. In order to make a real attempt at full-time streaming, I moved to a town where I had family, but no friends. I re-upped my bouldering hobby at a new gym in town and settled in. I took the term “full-time” seriously — 8 hours a day is a full-time job, I thought, so 8 hours a day is how much I’ll stream. If I want to be the best of the best, I have to work harder than everyone else. When they stop to rest, I’ll keep climbing. Taking breaks means losing ground, so I won’t take breaks. I will be the best.

My inner-monologue doesn’t sound like a work-obsessed manic freak at all…

Eventually, streaming overtook me. Streaming is not just sitting at a desk and playing video games. In an old blog post, I talked about how streaming is considered to be (by the uninformed) a lazy person’s job and that bystanders will often try to shame streamers by sneering at our discussions of streaming-related stress. As I said then, I am under no delusion that my job is the hardest job in the world. But my goal is not to have the hardest job — it is to be happy.

Anyway, streaming isn’t “just playing video games” as some seem to think. Especially for a person like me who enjoys video editing and graphic design, streaming entails a lot of work off-camera that adds up hours late into the night. Many streamers hire designers or editors, which is probably the smart way to do it, but I am a designer by trade and I enjoy pushing pixels in addition to streaming.

The problem with streaming is that it can become an addiction.

My whole life I’ve been a workaholic, a characteristic in me that was bred out of necessity in lean times, and my streaming career has been no different. Of course, I believe in the value of hard work and I think my hard-working attitude is generally a good thing which has netted me a fair amount of success. The issue is balance and moderation; my life has been very off-balance for a long time.

But it’s not just me — anywhere you look on Twitch you’ll find streamers who stream constantly and have an actual fear of taking days off. People who refuse to go to conventions or take weekends off like a normal human being because, if their sub count isn’t going up, they’re wringing their hands with nervous energy. People who can’t answer the question, “What do you do besides stream?” because the only answer is “Stare at my sub count anxiously.”

We are a breed of workers whose income is tenuous and unpredictable. We don’t have salaries or benefits. We “lose” subscribers daily and our livelihood relies on gaining subscribers faster than we lose them. We celebrate milestones with 12- or 24-hours straight of streaming. Can you imagine if your boss told you, “Hey, we just signed our 1000th client so this weekend we’re going to work for 24 hours straight”?

No way, boss, I’ve got Netflix shows to marathon.

We’re trained to believe that working more hours is directly connected to making more money because, after all, you don’t really gain subscribers if you aren’t live. Especially small channels where the streamer hasn’t yet started signing monthly contracts — they heavily rely on subscriptions which all but require the streamer to be live.

Being live = more subscribers = more money = more success.

So why wouldn’t you be live all the time, right? It makes sense. Streaming is easy, right? It’s just video games! Why not work as much as possible? Well, because life should be more than just your job. Many streamers will agree that being a variety streamer means slower channel growth but it has more satisfying results (the freedom to play whatever you want and still have an audience, essentially). Having a more balanced social × work life also means slower channel growth but has healthier results, a fact we tend to ignore in our fervor to become successful as fast as possible lest our success be snatched out from underneath us by some other, slightly harder working streamer. The fear is like a bogeyman blinding us to the outside world and keeping our noses to the grindstone of streaming. It’s important to know which sacrifices to make in the pursuit of long-term happiness.

“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life!”

The real problem for me, and probably a lot of other streamers, is that I truly love video games and streaming. It’s so hard for me to take a step back and see streaming as “work” because I enjoy it so thoroughly that I don’t see it for what it is most of the time. Over the past few months, I’ve started realizing that I have fallen into a very deep pit of addiction to my work that prevents me from living a balanced life.

Addiction is a condition that results when a person engages in an activity that can be pleasurable but the continuation of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary responsibilities, such as work, relationships, or health.

  • I knew I’d be traveling a lot last year for a couple months during Convention Season so I quit my gym to save money, fully intending to renew my membership when I had the time. I never renewed it.
  • I regularly skip meals, I don’t often sleep well or long enough, and I spend 10+ hours a day at my computer.
  • I genuinely feel anxious about the idea of taking days off.
  • I fell in love with streaming and I let that love justify me pushing everything else out of its way.

“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life!” is such a bullshit saying. Anything you do, even if it’s the thing you most love in the world, will eventually wear on you over time and especially if you let the thing you love overwhelm you.

A Change Is Gonna Come

The casual comment I always get when explaining my job is, “Man, how great is it to be your own boss?” and generally, my answer would be that it is fantastic. I feel so fortunate to have the life and job that I do. I feel so blessed and grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given and earned over the years. Please, if you are reading this and thinking that I sound ungrateful, please know that I am not and I have dedicated so much of my life to streaming because I love it. But the challenge with being your own boss is that you must also must be responsible for yourself and I hate to admit that I have been very irresponsible.

So, starting this week, I’m reducing the amount of hours I stream to make time for myself that is not filled with work. I’m also moving my day off to Monday; Sunday was originally selected because my family did Sunday night family dinners but that tradition got phased out as my brother moved out of town.

The new schedule is 2pm-8pm, Tuesday through Sunday.

I know that this might negatively impact some of my viewers’ abilities to watch the stream and that is never my desire, but it’s simply the schedule that works best for me with the necessary changes I need to make to my lifestyle.

Thanks for reading and understanding. Your support enables me to live a life I am blessed to have and I never forget that.

Sidenote: While I hope that none of what I have said comes across as negative criticism of other streamers who surely stream more than I do, work longer hours than I do, or truly enjoy doing 12+ hour streams, I hope that this post might serve as 1) a cautionary tale for some streamers who might not have opened their eyes to the easy way streaming can take over and 2) insight into the situation from my perspective so that my viewers might understand my line of thinking more thoroughly. If you stream 12+ hours a day and are happy, I’m happy for you! This post is just about my own perspective on streaming and how much of my life I want to give (or not give) to it.

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