Author’s Note: This was written way back in August of 2021 right before my second semester of college.
It’s surreal to be writing this, but I’m back.
Last fall, a year ago today, I stepped foot onto Harvard’s campus as a Freshman in the class of 2024. I prepared to finish writing the World Gone Mad Series and begin embarking on the experience of attending college during COVID-19 (which meant living in dorms, but school being online).
This is truly the year that everything changed.
After taking a gap year after high school to work on publishing novels (I published 9 that year, which some of you have read all of them… and if not you can find them here), I was feeling burnt out. I was feeling like my dream to be a 21st-century storyteller and create novels that propel humanity to a better future would never come true.
Writing is hard. Trying to make a living at it is almost impossible.
And after working for years to publish novels, I felt like fiction novels were all I had. A dozen books each my own children, the visions of the future and challenges humanity might face, the culmination of years of obsessing over things like climate change, nanotechnology, and BCIs.
A million-plus words deep into this, hundreds of hours spent running digital ads, obsessing over edits and learning the ins and outs of good design, marketing copy, EVERYTHING, I felt like a failure.
But I couldn’t give up on my dream.
So I quietly started uploading videos of my life to YouTube.
I didn’t expect much. Thought I could make a few hundred extra dollars to supplement the money I was losing each day writing and build an audience that may be interested in reading my books.
Then, 6 weeks in, it started to take off.
I was floored.
I had spent YEARS writing. Thousands of hours.
Meanwhile, with just a camera and a few hours of editing, I was able to build a YouTube channel that thousands watched.
Suddenly, I lost all motivation to write.
It felt like WRITING was the distraction.
I needed to do more YouTube. And just as I quietly started YouTube, I quietly put writing to the side, too embarrassed to admit to myself, even at first to my best friend, that I had delayed publication of my novel in my series, and then eventually scrapped working on it altogether.
I felt lost.
I felt guilty.
And I was more stressed than I had ever been in my life up to that point.
All the momentum I had managed to build in my writing career was now killed as I risked everything on a vlogging YouTube channel. How did I justify abandoning my passion, the one thing that has got me through my life and made me who I am (at least at the time that’s how I felt about writing, I’d told people I’d rather die than not write, then I stopped)?
I thought that it was the only way I could keep writing in the long run.
I thought that by building an audience on YouTube I could score deals with publishers and wield influence as a digital creator that could help me one day down the line market my books and spend my time writing and creating stories about the intersection of science, tech, society, politics, and the health, happiness, and lives of everyday people.
That at least was the dream.
I didn’t realize I had sold my soul.
To garner views on YouTube I had to create sensationalized content, which was often lacking in meaning and inauthentic. I knew that in order to keep growing I needed to do something crazy–to turn my life into the thriller novels that I wrote so people would keep watching.
And that’s when I asked David Vega, a man that I had just met at college a few weeks prior, to travel the country with me and live out of a bus for a few months filming YouTube videos.
He said yes.
I researched 40 hours per week about the YouTube algorithm and was so stressed that I was unable to focus in class and had to turn in my finals a week late (and was too embarrassed to tell anyone).
Then I woke up one day and said it’s time to go ALL IN.
I’m stuck doing online school for the next 9 months, and my mind is exploding with creativity, ambition, and stress to the point that I feel like I’m going insane. We just bought an actual school bus and committed to go on a trip that we aren’t quite sure how we are going to pay for anymore. And I just left all my friends and won’t be seeing them again until (if we are lucky) next fall.
And what did screw it mean for me? It meant let’s go ALL IN.
It meant that I had lost sight of myself, lost sight of my identity, and lost sight of my future, and felt like I had nothing to lose. It meant that I felt too deep into the chase and was willing to run right off a cliff if that meant winning in the end.
For us, that meant starting a new YouTube channel to film our adventures across the country. We started pulling an all-nighter driving to the Beast Burger restaurant.
That was just the warm-up.
I pulled a second all-nighter and called Vega frantically at 3 AM as I realized a famous YouTuber Airrack was camping on an island in Florida and live-streaming his life till he hit a million subscribers.
I decided we should kayak to it an inflatable raft (despite his inability to truly swim) and leave at 2 AM the day after Christmas to ask for an internship dressed in suits.
It made no sense. Yet, in the moment it made all the sense in the world.
A YouTube video of this adventure used to be live (I have since deleted all my YouTube videos and most of our adventures were not uploaded but remain on an external hard drive… I want my legacy to live on in words for now).
We made it to the island, soaked and wet with a cake in hand.
We then proceeded to have an interview on a live stream where we had to explain why two random guys from Harvard were in Palm Beach, Florida, the day after Christmas crashing an island that a YouTuber was on.
We ended up getting his manager’s phone number and traveled back to South Carolina (where I live), where we made preparations to travel the country and produce viral IRL challenge videos.
We renovated the bus. Then it broke down. We did all 472 subway stations in NYC in 24 hours, went to the world’s largest open air drug market, did Urbex in Detroit, and then ended our adventure in mid-January in a haunted forest in Pennsylvania in the middle of the snow.
My mission was to remain in the cold with no supplies for 24 hours while Vega was in the car, just in case I got attacked by a ghost or died of frostbite.
When my limbs lost feeling I gave up, close to 1 AM in the morning. To make a horrific story short, I was exhausted, and we had an 8-hour drive ahead of us. We crashed the car into the median 30 seconds after I took control of the wheel.
I felt like my life was over.
I remember waking up the next morning, walking around in the cold throughout a cemetery next to our shitty motel, wondering what the purpose of anything was. The people who loved me most were scared for my life, and most of all, I had almost lost myself.
I returned to Harvard that weekend to visit a few friends and took the bus inside of Harvard Yard. I knew I couldn’t ever take things that far again. But I felt lost, alone, and had no idea what to do except forge on.
We planned to travel the rest of the country starting in March, and I was supposed to drive the bus home to Charleston, South Carolina while taking online school. But I still felt lost, overwhelmed, and was racing to beat a snowstorm slamming D.C. right as I was about to drive through it.
Then I got a call that changed my life.
It was from a start-up called Airtime that Sean Parker founded and has worked on for years. They wanted me to livestream my adventures as part of the new iteration of the app to create live social spaces, and they were going to pay us for the content we created.
Overnight all the worries I had about traveling on the bus around the country were gone. And the irony is not lost on me as to the connection between Mark Zuckerberg and Harvard and my own connection. Except instead of having Sean Parker connect me to Peter Theil, I was suddenly traveling the country and livestreaming for a technology start-up.
The timing of this was particularly weird because the call came on the first day of the semester and right as I started working on a creator economy start-up with two of my Harvard friends (Elliott Detjen and David Vega). The idea was to try and build a better internet for creators led by creators. That looked like solving friction that platforms create between creators and their audiences, enabling greater, democratized discovery for creators, and ultimately helping more creators to make a living and do what they love. Specific iterations of this manifested in concepts that ranged from seeing all of your social media posts in one feed (think a visual Linktree with a discovery network built in), a Bookbub style curation engine (inspired by my time in digital advertising and auditing courses for Mark Dawson… that all started in Vegas but is a story for another day), and building a hub for social gaming that combined Discord with Twitch and Steam. Ambitious ideas began development and we even became a finalist in the Harvard i3 pitch competition. But that’s just a subplot.
What you need to know is that my mind was swinging for the fences.
I felt so much pressure.
Having multiple Harvard students entrusting time they could be spending building their futures to be building something with me felt like a huge responsibility. Writing a book and creating stories that could inspire others to change the world and spark valuable conversations around tech, politics, and society wasn’t enough.
WE HAD TO CHANGE THE WORLD. And we had to do it TODAY.
That pressure nearly killed me.
No longer were car crashes the threat, it was an endless ambition that thought in the scale of billions of dollars instead of thousands, and world changing technologies instead of world changing stories. I honed the ability to think of start-up ideas, concepting dozens of ideas for internet start-ups and obsessively reading substacks, listening to podcasts, and talking to anyone who would utter the words creator economy.
I eventually couldn’t focus on school again, this time choosing to take a leave of absence to go all-in on playing manhunt and scavenger hunt live on stream (I’m not even kidding) as a means to fund travels across the country, filming for a media start-up called Boundless, and a tech-start-up called Kimera (we were running things lean, one of us even lost 40 pounds while traveling).
And suddenly my 55-year-old uncle was working full time, helping to host these livestreams, and manage my life that was increasingly out of control. The day’s activities could range from driving four hours, attempting to kayak to Joe Rogan’s house (yes, we actually did that and ended up crashing a party of one of the world’s largest concert promoters instead), and speaking with executives at Airtime about potential countrywide marketing deals in a massive bus while working with my team to concept the prototype for our start-up. I even delivered pizza to the executive assistant of Elon Musk and scored her phone number (a win for the boys).
It was wild.
Everyday was wake up and go for 17 hours before I crashed, barely having time to eat, only to do it all over again.
Oh YEAH, and everyday we were sleeping in a new city, traveling over 22,000 miles as we criss-crossed the country, doing everything from giving the Sway Boys of TikTok a keg of beer, jumping off the Santa Monica Pier when encountering Airrack again (don’t ask how “air” became a motif in this story).
In May the travels finally came to an end, all of us gearing for the real development of Kimera over the summer. I was even more stressed before. Not getting any sleep and unable to even stop thinking about work for a second.
I was in a dark place.
I decided I would go back to Harvard in the fall, but didn’t know how I’d have time to sleep, nevermind attend class. I was missing writing and after making money being a creator, traveling the country and experiencing things that are nearly unfathomable in terms of both the highs and lows, I realized that none of it made me happy.
I was living the dream, except it was a nightmare. I was drowning in stress, work, and wasn’t fulfilled due to not being able to write or be around the people that I love. I felt unworthy in moments. In other moments I felt like I could be doing so much better and all it would take is having one company take off, or blowing up on the internet to A-List celeb status and then I’d be happy.
But then I realized it’s all bullshit.
Life’s not about the next goal. The next thing. Or pushing yourself till you drop. Life’s not about pursuing a dream of wealth, fame, power, and influence. It’s not about any of the things society tell us. It’s not about adventure, or crazy experiences. It’s just about loving yourself and the people around you and spreading that to the world in the ways you can.
And I had lost that love for myself. I had lost myself. And was now drowning in responsibility, stress, and had given myself no space to reflect, center myself, or rest.
So I decided to step back from the tech company (we had already decided to stop YouTube a few weeks prior… all footage is saved though). I took the last half of the summer off, spending the first few weeks doing nothing but detoxing from the work and stress.
Each morning I’d wake up with a heavy feeling in my stomach and my heart beating fast.
I had been addicted to the adrenaline. Addicted to the chase.
For some people it’s romance. For others it’s money, prestige, power. For most it’s just trying to pay the bills and feed their families.
The chase is in many ways part of life. But when it becomes life. When it becomes your everything.
Then you have no choice but to want more. To never be satisfied and be clawing after bigger and bigger ideas and bigger and bigger paychecks into you are rich and sad and quickly finding yourself inside a Post Malone song (rich and sad is a great song, highly recommend) or find yourself living inside a movie that you feel is out of your own control, just like me.
So finally, I realized it was time to change.
I was done with the chase. I was done throwing myself to the side. And I was done trying to get more in life instead of being happy with the life you have today. I was ready to conquer the monster of my own ambition that had swallowed me alive.
It was time to pull myself out.
If it wasn’t for the people who love me, I again don’t know if I could have done this. But in a few short weeks I felt like a completely different person. I started to regularly meditate, engage in yoga, mindfully rest and relax, and refocused my life back around writing and storytelling, my real passion.
I decided to stop chasing the views, the money, or building world changing tech companies.
I just want to be myself.
I just want to be happy and engage in the process of endless discovery and exploration of myself and the world around me. I want to learn. I want to have fun. And most of all, I want to love myself and the people around me more than ever.
What does that look like?
It means I’m back.
After a long time gone, I’m back to writing.
And I’m working on a new series that encapsulates a lot of what I emotionally went through along with my hopes, fears, and ideas about where the future of democracy and climate change is headed.
I’m also back at Harvard trying to learn as much as I can about the people and world around me so I can create better stories and ultimately propel humanity to a better future.
I hope to share thousands of ideas over the next few years about new ways technologies and science can be better managed to benefit humanity and how we can leverage future technological developments to maximize the positive impacts for the public good and limit the downside. This foundation will always come back to me writing fiction stories, but may realize itself in working with start-ups, politics, non-profits, and a million other avenues.
In short, I keep an open mind. And seek to not only shape my own perspective, but elevate the experiences and voices of others who can all shape the world we live in today and how we think about and ultimately confront the big problems facing humanity today and tomorrow.
Together, we can change the world.
Together, anything is possible.
Together, we are boundless.
I believe that now more than ever. Am happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life, and am so privileged and excited to share as much love as I can with the world and inspire others to build their visions of what a better future looks like–together.
Thank you for reading this. Thank you if you have connected with my story in any way.
I’d love if you could share this with a friend or with your network if you think they would benefit. And if you are a creative, entrepreneur, or anyone who resonates with my struggle (I know there are lots of you out there), I’d love to hear from you at michael@mevansinked.com.
In the end, everything is worth it if you can learn more about yourself and become a more mature person in the process.
I’m excited to see the person I become over the next few years and beyond.
But most of all, I’m excited for today.
Life isn’t just a gift. Every moment is a snowflake, the second you touch it disappears.
Enjoy the taste on your tongue. Be grateful for it. Nothing lasts forever.
MY UPDATE:
It is the end of 2021 as I write this and I finished my second semester at Harvard. It’s wild to see how much a perspective can change in just a few months. My goal is not to write here and try and change my thoughts in the moment, but instead, update you briefly on how my life has evolved since.
I have begun working with the Peek team to bring social reading to life.
My first semester in college was great and inspired me to hone in my future studies on story science. I have been meditating every day going to therapy once a week and am generally happy and healthy.
This last year tested my mental health at the limits that every creator faces. This extreme journey taught me so much about myself and has prepared me to be a better creator and entrepreneur than ever before.
My plans for 2022 should be exciting and lots of fun and I can’t wait to get it underway. But for now, I must finish my latest novel, Millennium Game. I’ll see y’all soon.
But in the meantime don’t forget…
Together we are boundless.
All the best,
Michael Evans