The daily YouTube vlogger is a strange breed of internet celebrity, broadcasting earnestly as they go about their day. There’s something strangely compelling about the sense of intimacy many of them create, but there’s also something deeply strange about the image of these people standing in the supermarket or subway somewhere talking into their phones and then just going back to their day. It must be alienating to turn the minutiae of your daily life into fodder for content.
This video by Jackson Pacheco is pitched as a BuzzFeed parody, creating one tiny wrinkle in a YouTuber’s day and making a whole series of dopey, feel-good observations out of it, but really it captures the entire earnest tone of the medium. Pacheco starts reveling in total abstractions—he’s been “feeling okay” but is “changing things up” to make them “somewhat different”—which then turn out to be sea changes like going to a different Starbucks than he normally does or ordering something different from that Starbucks. Ultimately, these minor shifts in his schedule, as well as the constant self-examination that YouTube vlogging requires, sends him spiraling into an existential panic over the sight of raisins at a grocery store. It’s both an affectionate primer on the tone of these sorts of videos and a sly satire on the distance from reality it must take to make one.