Fil-Am vlogger Alex Wassabi to take break from YouTube after 15 years
YouTube star Alex Wassabi (real name: Alex Burris), announced that he will take a break from creating videos after 15 years on the platform.
Burris, 30, explained to his millions of followers on his channel Wassabi why he wanted to go on a hiatus, in a vlog titled “Thanks for the last 15 years… Goodbye” on Friday, Jan. 1.
“I’m honestly burnt out guys. I feel less creative,” he said. “I don’t have the same urge to create that I used to.”
“So I want to take a break to just be myself, just figure out who I am, just figure out what I want to do with this channel or if I even want to be a YouTube creator anymore.”
Burris said that since he launched the channel in January 2006, he had not taken a break for longer than a week, his reason being that he felt pressured other people depended on him.
“Growing up my dad was the ‘put your team on your back’ kind of guy… That was instilled in me my whole life,” he said. “That’s why I’ve always been so scared to take a break. Don’t stop, keep going, people depend on you… you can’t let them down. That’s what I’ve always believed.”
He realized, however, the toll it took on his mental health only later on.
“But now that I’m older I’ve realized that I can’t spend my life trying to make people happy,” Burris said. “It’s what I’ve wanted to do when I was a kid but I’m realizing now that’s not mentally healthy.”
He noted too that the line between Alex Burris and Alex Wassabi had become blurred, and it had come to a point that he could not enjoy time without his camera.
“The reason I’m taking this break is I don’t feel like myself anymore. I don’t even know who I am,” he said.
The content creator could return by February, but it depends on how he feels and if he still thinks YouTube would be his platform of choice.
“I don’t wanna come back unless I’m excited again,” he stressed.
Wassabi Productions started out as the channel of Fil-Am vlogger Roi Fabito, Burris’s friend from high school. It was first called “hoiitsroi” and became Wassabi after Burris joined Fabito. The two made music video parodies and other comedy videos together, and gained a worldwide following. Fabito eventually left in 2016 and Burris continued to run the channel, which has 11.5 million subscribers, on his own. JB
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