I chanced upon a welsh YouTuber’s videos recently, where she’s living on £1 a day for meals. Not because she couldn’t afford more, she’s a YouTubers with almost 1 million subscribers, surely, she can afford more than £1 a day. She says she’s been doing this challenge to be more appreciative of what she has and to see first-hand how life is for many ppl who are less privileged.
Now, I get why she’s doing this, and I’ve not got anything against her for that. But what threw me off guard was how she managed it.
Let’s do the math here first. £1 a day for 7 days. What would do if you only had £1 a day for the whole week to feed yourself? Option 1: You buy a combination of groceries for £7 and cook several meals for the week. Option 2: Go to the grocery store every day and look for reduced item food or cheap canned food and survive with it.
My common sense says buy food for £7 and cook several meals for the week. Saves time so you don’t have to think of what to eat every morning, saves petrol from unnecessary traveling to different grocery stores every day, reduces stress cos you know that you already have enough food, most importantly, you would still be eating somewhat healthy.
This YouTuber chose the latter. Day 1 till day 3 she did this. She uploaded day 1’s video at the end of day 3. So when she started for video for day 4, she announced that she’s read the comments that indicated that she was cooking spaghetti wrong, gave tips that McDonald’s gives free ketchup, she can get free food by looking for coupons online, and that she can microwave her stale hard bread to make it soft.
Who cares whether you break the spaghetti in half before boiling it, I do that too for convenience sake? Who’s to say what is right and wrong anymore now. What works for one wouldn’t necessarily work for another. Didn’t anyone suggest that she could have gone for option 1? Didn’t anyone think of it that way? Or didn’t she read all the comments? This bothered me for a bit, so I took it upon myself and read the comments. Nope. No one suggested this. Ok, let’s set that aside for now.
She’s a YouTuber with almost 1 million followers. She’s been doing this for almost 7 years now if I’m not mistaken. She basically lives in the internet, hasn’t she heard of Google??? For the number of times that she complained about the hard bread, a simple 1 minute google search would have solved her misery. She was stating that she had to hunt for cheap food every day and cook every day, and that was tiring her out. Hasn’t she ever heard of meal preps? How can she have spent that much time on the internet and not heard about such things?
Is she being ignorant, or am I the one who’s ignorant? I had a similar thought when I came across another YouTuber some time ago who didn’t make much sense about something rather common, and I thought, how can he be so ignorant. I mean, I myself rely on Google and YouTube for almost everyday living. Don’t people who make a living out of these platforms learn things from it too? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to be more aware of their surroundings rather than just say whatever they want to say and allow themselves to be subjected to ridicules?
Lately, there has been many open discussions about mental health, anxiety and depression that comes with putting yourself out there on the internet and opening your life for others to see, comment and condemn is a scary thing. If you are willing to do that, wouldn’t you want to be prepared and have your defences ready? It is one thing to be knowledgeable and share that with others and another to think that you are the know-it-all just because you’ve got a large number of followings.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time now and still do not have an answer. Why would someone who works with the internet not use it to their benefit?
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