Was deleting everything the right move? For me, yes, though not for the reasons people assumed when I did it. In the summer of 2025 I deleted my original YouTube channel, my X account with tens of thousands of followers, and the crypto channel with around fifty thousand subscribers. I had already deleted thousands of crypto videos earlier that year, and I sold my gaming consoles. My ad revenue went from thousands a month to almost nothing. I still think the decision was correct, because the deleting was never really about the content.
What I finally understood was that the real barrier was my marriage. As long as my channels, accounts and games were still up, I had an escape hatch. I had tried to quit before, in 2020 and again in 2024, and both times I left the door open and walked back through it. If I deleted everything, there would be no distraction left and I would have to look directly at my marriage. That is the truth I had been running from for years, and it is the core of Deleting Everything to Finally Face My Marriage.
The road there was not a clean line. In 2023 I deleted my Facebook page, which had millions of followers and had taken more than a decade to build. I was done with that platform after the demonetization, and I threw myself into music. I released hundreds of songs over the next two years. Then in 2024 I spent more than two thousand dollars on Marvel Snap cards, quit the game three separate times, and kept coming back. That stretch is in I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End, and it is where I first saw that the games and the money were covering up how unhappy I was at home.
By the summer of 2025 I was posting six, eight, sometimes twelve videos a day, scheduling uploads every three hours, and binging Warzone for hours at a time. Some days I streamed for seven hours to almost nobody. After one three-day binge I felt like I was on drugs, and I had been sober for eleven years at that point. I could see what was coming next, which was depression. I put up one final video saying I was gone for good, and then I deleted everything. Three days later I caught myself planning one more video to explain myself. That was the signal I needed.
Deleting was only the first step. I went on two road trips with my ex-wife after I deleted everything, and both ended in day-long fights and long stretches of silence. Everything that had been avoided came to the surface, and that carried us into July 2025. I did not know how I would make money or what direction I would take, but I knew I could not stop creating. That is how my Daily Autobiography series started, and the days right after the deletion are where my book Author in St. Petersburg picks up.
Clearing out the physical stuff came next. In August 2025 I gave roughly a thousand dollars of monitors, lighting, stands and mic arms to a video production business, because keeping that gear in the house made me feel like I was standing still. I wrote about it in Clearing Out the Old to Make Room. The resistance I felt before making that call was the same mental block that keeps people from opportunities, and I was glad I pushed through it.
My view changed as the posts piled up. In the August 2025 entry I was still sorting through equipment and trying to get out of my own way. In October 2025, in Why Deleting Everything Finally Made Life Make Sense, I wrote that for the first time in years my life felt like it made sense, and that the failures I had lived through seemed to lead to that point. The June 2026 posts are less tidy. They describe the fights, the silence and the realization that deleting everything was only the start of facing my marriage.
Below this page you will find all four posts in full, newest first, so you can follow the sequence from the Facebook deletion through the consoles and the marriage. If you want the wider picture, my writing books page covers the author phase, and my video game addiction page covers the gaming side in more depth. My divorce page picks up the marriage thread after these posts.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End (June 21, 2026)
- Deleting Everything: Why I Erased My Channels to Face My Marriage (June 21, 2026)
- Why Deleting Everything Finally Made Life Make Sense (October 30, 2025)
- Clearing Out the Old to Make Room (August 6, 2025)
I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
Meanwhile, the crypto channel was thriving. I had a month where I made more than ten thousand dollars selling a crypto course. The whole crypto arc is something I describe much more fully in I Was Famous on the Internet, so I do not want to rehash all of it here. What matters is that the channel exploded in 2023. I became one of the rising faces on crypto YouTube. The views were huge. The money was flowing. And, predictably, it still was not enough. I got bored. The same pattern repeated itself. No matter how well something worked, it never filled whatever I kept trying to fill.
By the summer of 2023, I quit gaming again. This time it was because I decided I wanted to make music instead. That yoga crush had lit something up in me that I had not felt in a long time. Even though I had not seen her in months, I still thought about her every single day. I did not tell my ex-wife for months. I talked about it with my mom, my sponsor, and people at AA. At one point in the past, I had told my ex-wife about having a crush on someone at AA, and I remembered her saying she did not want to hear about crushes anymore. So I kept this one mostly to myself.
The road to quitting gaming was similar to 2016 and 2019. I told myself I did not have enough time for it and it was not making money anyway. In a moment of weakness just before quitting, I even went back and did a Call of Duty Warzone stream on Facebook after swearing I would stream there again. It was awful despite having a solid audience. I made no money. I played terribly. I got frustrated. Not long after that, I ended up deleting my Facebook page entirely, a page with millions of followers that had taken me more than a decade to build. I was still demonetized a year and a half later, not even for the race change anymore, but for some ridiculous unoriginality flag after posting a clip from one of my own live streams. When I tried to get help, I hit nothing but bots. Because I was no longer in the Facebook Gaming program, there was no human support. Nobody cared. Even though my posts were still reaching hundreds of thousands of people some days, almost none of them would follow me to Twitch or YouTube where I was monetized.
I snapped. In a mix of anger and exhaustion, I deleted the entire page. Over the next couple of years, I would sometimes regret it, thinking about the massive audience I had thrown away and wondering if monetization might have been fixable someday. At the same time, I felt free. I was finally done with Facebook. I got rid of all my gaming gear. I shut that door completely. And I went all in on music. If you are ready to close a chapter that has been draining you and pour yourself into something you actually love, let's map out that next chapter together when you book a one-on-one call with me.
I bought an Ableton Push 3 for $1000 to start. I bought another keyboard. I started live streaming music. Crypto became the stable money engine again, and music became the creative outlet. Over the next two years, I released hundreds of songs on Spotify all under my name Jerry Banfield. I was just listening to my Bandance album yesterday which still rocks 3 years later. I am genuinely proud of the amount of music I made and how much my skill improved compared to where I had been before. I made some songs that are absolute bangers. There is one called Petra’s House Party that still makes me smile every time I hear it.
I also made a song about the girl from yoga. I called it Tuesday Yoga Crush, even though the crush really lived on other days of the week. I named it that because I basically stole the structure and energy from the song Tuesday and made my own version. The lyrics were ridiculous and hilarious, and I laughed my ass off while making it. I even started planning a fiction book inspired by the whole experience.
That crush, as messy and painful as it was, reignited something in me. It made me want to really create again. It pulled me back into music with a level of intensity I had not felt in years. It was crazy how something that never even turned into a relationship could shake my life so deeply and push me into an entirely new creative phase.
After Tuesday Yoga Crush released, I finally told my ex-wife about the crush I had on the girl at yoga. That confession became another major resentment my ex-wife added to the growing pile. Once I told her, it felt like another nail going into the coffin of our marriage. I released that song right before I deleted Facebook, and the response was wild. Big streamers played it on their streams. Some of the top Facebook streamers were laughing, vibing to it, loving it. Seeing my music land like that felt incredible. For a moment, I thought, holy shit, my music is actually getting traction.
If I had to pick my favorite song from that period, it would be She Did. That one came straight out of my obsession with Deadmau5. He made a track called Aural Psynapse, and when I listened to it, I could hear what felt like subliminal lyrics buried in it, something sensual hiding inside the melody. The song was so hypnotic and clever that I loved it immediately. I made my own version of that idea with She Did. If you listen to Aural Psynapse and then listen to She Did, you can hear the similarities. I did not copy the notes directly, but the influence is obvious. I loved that song. It felt like I had cracked into something real creatively.
From there, I went on a tear. I released a ton of albums across Spotify and everywhere else people listen to music. I made songs that people genuinely loved, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun doing it. I even experimented with diary-style tracks. I put out a small album called 11 Exercises in Power. I made ambient music. I made a dance track called This Is Your Mom. I made another one called Home Base. I recorded freestyle tracks that were funny as hell, like Perfection Is Obedience, God Mode, and Drop That Bottom on my One Time album. I made an album called Bandance with a track called FN Goat that I still think is great. I made Bantrap with a bunch of trap songs, including several about buying ICP. I created a digital wellbeing course in audio form. I made a full 12 Steps of AA album. One night at a meeting, a woman I was talking to told me that she and her sponsor had listened to that entire 12-step album on Spotify. That blew my mind. I had made something that actually mattered to someone.
The album that Tuesday Yoga Crush is on is called August 2023 with Jerry Banfield. It was my first album in five years. Just talking about it now makes me want to make music again. I love making music. The problem is time. Who has time to make music, write books, record audiobooks, and do everything else I was doing? Still, that yoga crush was enormous in my life. It lit a fire that changed the direction of my creativity.
As 2023 went on, life smoothed out on the surface. I was making music. I was running the crypto channel. My ex-wife was steady in her job. The crypto channel started producing consistent income. We hit a period of stability. From sometime in late 2023 into 2024, there was not much drama to report. We were grinding. We were functioning. Things looked calm from the outside. But underneath, the unresolved stuff was still there, quietly accumulating, waiting for whatever would come next.
In 2024, after about six months away from video games, I started playing again. My ex-wife was furious. It was the same story we had already lived through multiple times. You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do. I had made a bunch of music albums, but I missed gaming. I found a game called Marvel Snap. It was similar to Gods Unchained, but with a much bigger audience and no NFTs. It was even more addictive. In early 2024, with solid crypto income coming in, I spent over two thousand dollars on Marvel Snap cards without much hesitation. I started streaming it on Twitch and slid right back into gaming. At the same time, I was still making music. Creatively, I was on fire. I was producing an absurd amount of content.
At one point in 2023, I had as many as eight YouTube channels across different topics. I deleted several of them, then made new ones. Over the years, I ended up with four separate Jerry Banfield gaming channels, plus gaming videos posted on at least two other channels. I had a crypto reviews channel. I was everywhere. I had money coming in. People were scheduling calls on jerrybanfield.com where they were paying me three hundred dollars an hour to talk to me on Zoom about crypto, and I was turning around and spending lots of that money on video games. I was chasing Twitch Partner again, this time with Marvel Snap. When I played it on my tablet, the addiction was vicious. I was live streaming constantly. I was playing during my time with the kids and even got them their own accounts to play the game too. It started to become obvious that something deeper was going on.
I had a breakthrough when I realized that my Marvel Snap addiction was covering up how uncomfortable and unsatisfied I was in my marriage. I kept asking myself why I could not stop. In 2024 alone, I quit Marvel Snap three separate times. Each time, I made videos saying I was done, that the game was addictive, that people should not play it. Then two weeks later, I would come back and spend more money while releasing another I’m back video. I told my ex-wife how much I was spending, and she was furious. I was embarrassed. I shared openly in AA that I had a new addiction. At the same time, I had not seen the girl from yoga in over a year, and I still thought about her almost every day. Every yoga class, I still looked for her. Every woman who was not her felt like a disappointment. If you keep circling back to a habit you cannot seem to quit and you sense it is covering up something deeper, I am glad to help you look at it honestly when you schedule a private call with me and bring it to me on our call.
Around July 2024, after quitting Marvel Snap for the third time, I got rid of all my gaming systems again. I had bought a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X … again. The kids were playing constantly, glued to tablets and consoles. I shut it all down. I quit Marvel Snap and told myself, fuck it. If quitting gaming means I finally have to face my marriage, then that is what I am going to do.
That same month, I flew to Michigan by myself for my nephew’s graduation. I really wanted to go. My ex-wife did not. She said she was too busy, gave the usual reasons. Earlier that year, around New Year’s at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, we had taken the kids to Michigan in the winter. They absolutely loved it. We went to Frankenmuth, went ice skating, saw snow, and spent time with family. It was a beautiful trip. Because of that, my ex-wife did not want to go again in the summer. So in July, I flew up by myself to attend my nephew’s graduation party.
On that trip, something crystallized with shocking clarity. I knew I needed to get divorced. I did not want to be in the marriage anymore. It was not a dramatic revelation. It was calm, certain, and undeniable. My ex-wife and I had already had multiple fights since the yoga crush where she had essentially told me that if I wanted someone like that, I should go be with her, that she would cooperate, and that everything would be fine. Strangely, even though part of me had fantasized about that outcome, when she actually said it, I shut it down. I told her no, we had to stay together. I told myself there was no point in being with someone else, because then I would have to deal with them and still deal with my ex-wife. The truth was more uncomfortable. I did not feel like I had time to get divorced. My work consumed me completely. I was obsessed with making videos, producing content, staying relevant. The idea of navigating a divorce felt impossible not because it was emotionally hard, but because I was too addicted to my work to step away and deal with it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Deleting Everything: Why I Erased My Channels to Face My Marriage
Originally published June 21, 2026.
Was deleting everything the right move? For me, yes, though not for the reasons people assumed when I did it. In the summer of 2025 I deleted my original YouTube channel, my X account with tens of thousands of followers, and the crypto channel with around fifty thousand subscribers. I had already deleted thousands of crypto videos earlier that year, and I sold my gaming consoles. My ad revenue went from thousands a month to almost nothing. I still think the decision was correct, because the deleting was never really about the content.
What I finally understood was that the real barrier was my marriage. As long as my channels, accounts and games were still up, I had an escape hatch. I had tried to quit before, in 2020 and again in 2024, and both times I left the door open and walked back through it. If I deleted everything, there would be no distraction left and I would have to look directly at my marriage. That is the truth I had been running from for years, and it is the core of Deleting Everything to Finally Face My Marriage.
The road there was not a clean line. In 2023 I deleted my Facebook page, which had millions of followers and had taken more than a decade to build. I was done with that platform after the demonetization, and I threw myself into music. I released hundreds of songs over the next two years. Then in 2024 I spent more than two thousand dollars on Marvel Snap cards, quit the game three separate times, and kept coming back. That stretch is in I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End, and it is where I first saw that the games and the money were covering up how unhappy I was at home.
By the summer of 2025 I was posting six, eight, sometimes twelve videos a day, scheduling uploads every three hours, and binging Warzone for hours at a time. Some days I streamed for seven hours to almost nobody. After one three-day binge I felt like I was on drugs, and I had been sober for eleven years at that point. I could see what was coming next, which was depression. I put up one final video saying I was gone for good, and then I deleted everything. Three days later I caught myself planning one more video to explain myself. That was the signal I needed.
Deleting was only the first step. I went on two road trips with my ex-wife after I deleted everything, and both ended in day-long fights and long stretches of silence. Everything that had been avoided came to the surface, and that carried us into July 2025. I did not know how I would make money or what direction I would take, but I knew I could not stop creating. That is how my Daily Autobiography series started, and the days right after the deletion are where my book Author in St. Petersburg picks up.
Clearing out the physical stuff came next. In August 2025 I gave roughly a thousand dollars of monitors, lighting, stands and mic arms to a video production business, because keeping that gear in the house made me feel like I was standing still. I wrote about it in Clearing Out the Old to Make Room. The resistance I felt before making that call was the same mental block that keeps people from opportunities, and I was glad I pushed through it.
My view changed as the posts piled up. In the August 2025 entry I was still sorting through equipment and trying to get out of my own way. In October 2025, in Why Deleting Everything Finally Made Life Make Sense, I wrote that for the first time in years my life felt like it made sense, and that the failures I had lived through seemed to lead to that point. The June 2026 posts are less tidy. They describe the fights, the silence and the realization that deleting everything was only the start of facing my marriage.
Below this page you will find all four posts in full, newest first, so you can follow the sequence from the Facebook deletion through the consoles and the marriage. If you want the wider picture, my writing books page covers the author phase, and my video game addiction page covers the gaming side in more depth. My divorce page picks up the marriage thread after these posts.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End (June 21, 2026)
I Deleted Facebook, Made Music, and Saw the End
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
Meanwhile, the crypto channel was thriving. I had a month where I made more than ten thousand dollars selling a crypto course. The whole crypto arc is something I describe much more fully in I Was Famous on the Internet, so I do not want to rehash all of it here. What matters is that the channel exploded in 2023. I became one of the rising faces on crypto YouTube. The views were huge. The money was flowing. And, predictably, it still was not enough. I got bored. The same pattern repeated itself. No matter how well something worked, it never filled whatever I kept trying to fill.
By the summer of 2023, I quit gaming again. This time it was because I decided I wanted to make music instead. That yoga crush had lit something up in me that I had not felt in a long time. Even though I had not seen her in months, I still thought about her every single day. I did not tell my ex-wife for months. I talked about it with my mom, my sponsor, and people at AA. At one point in the past, I had told my ex-wife about having a crush on someone at AA, and I remembered her saying she did not want to hear about crushes anymore. So I kept this one mostly to myself.
The road to quitting gaming was similar to 2016 and 2019. I told myself I did not have enough time for it and it was not making money anyway. In a moment of weakness just before quitting, I even went back and did a Call of Duty Warzone stream on Facebook after swearing I would stream there again. It was awful despite having a solid audience. I made no money. I played terribly. I got frustrated. Not long after that, I ended up deleting my Facebook page entirely, a page with millions of followers that had taken me more than a decade to build. I was still demonetized a year and a half later, not even for the race change anymore, but for some ridiculous unoriginality flag after posting a clip from one of my own live streams. When I tried to get help, I hit nothing but bots. Because I was no longer in the Facebook Gaming program, there was no human support. Nobody cared. Even though my posts were still reaching hundreds of thousands of people some days, almost none of them would follow me to Twitch or YouTube where I was monetized.
I snapped. In a mix of anger and exhaustion, I deleted the entire page. Over the next couple of years, I would sometimes regret it, thinking about the massive audience I had thrown away and wondering if monetization might have been fixable someday. At the same time, I felt free. I was finally done with Facebook. I got rid of all my gaming gear. I shut that door completely. And I went all in on music. If you are ready to close a chapter that has been draining you and pour yourself into something you actually love, let's map out that next chapter together when you book a one-on-one call with me.
I bought an Ableton Push 3 for $1000 to start. I bought another keyboard. I started live streaming music. Crypto became the stable money engine again, and music became the creative outlet. Over the next two years, I released hundreds of songs on Spotify all under my name Jerry Banfield. I was just listening to my Bandance album yesterday which still rocks 3 years later. I am genuinely proud of the amount of music I made and how much my skill improved compared to where I had been before. I made some songs that are absolute bangers. There is one called Petra’s House Party that still makes me smile every time I hear it.
I also made a song about the girl from yoga. I called it Tuesday Yoga Crush, even though the crush really lived on other days of the week. I named it that because I basically stole the structure and energy from the song Tuesday and made my own version. The lyrics were ridiculous and hilarious, and I laughed my ass off while making it. I even started planning a fiction book inspired by the whole experience.
That crush, as messy and painful as it was, reignited something in me. It made me want to really create again. It pulled me back into music with a level of intensity I had not felt in years. It was crazy how something that never even turned into a relationship could shake my life so deeply and push me into an entirely new creative phase.
After Tuesday Yoga Crush released, I finally told my ex-wife about the crush I had on the girl at yoga. That confession became another major resentment my ex-wife added to the growing pile. Once I told her, it felt like another nail going into the coffin of our marriage. I released that song right before I deleted Facebook, and the response was wild. Big streamers played it on their streams. Some of the top Facebook streamers were laughing, vibing to it, loving it. Seeing my music land like that felt incredible. For a moment, I thought, holy shit, my music is actually getting traction.
If I had to pick my favorite song from that period, it would be She Did. That one came straight out of my obsession with Deadmau5. He made a track called Aural Psynapse, and when I listened to it, I could hear what felt like subliminal lyrics buried in it, something sensual hiding inside the melody. The song was so hypnotic and clever that I loved it immediately. I made my own version of that idea with She Did. If you listen to Aural Psynapse and then listen to She Did, you can hear the similarities. I did not copy the notes directly, but the influence is obvious. I loved that song. It felt like I had cracked into something real creatively.
From there, I went on a tear. I released a ton of albums across Spotify and everywhere else people listen to music. I made songs that people genuinely loved, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun doing it. I even experimented with diary-style tracks. I put out a small album called 11 Exercises in Power. I made ambient music. I made a dance track called This Is Your Mom. I made another one called Home Base. I recorded freestyle tracks that were funny as hell, like Perfection Is Obedience, God Mode, and Drop That Bottom on my One Time album. I made an album called Bandance with a track called FN Goat that I still think is great. I made Bantrap with a bunch of trap songs, including several about buying ICP. I created a digital wellbeing course in audio form. I made a full 12 Steps of AA album. One night at a meeting, a woman I was talking to told me that she and her sponsor had listened to that entire 12-step album on Spotify. That blew my mind. I had made something that actually mattered to someone.
The album that Tuesday Yoga Crush is on is called August 2023 with Jerry Banfield. It was my first album in five years. Just talking about it now makes me want to make music again. I love making music. The problem is time. Who has time to make music, write books, record audiobooks, and do everything else I was doing? Still, that yoga crush was enormous in my life. It lit a fire that changed the direction of my creativity.
As 2023 went on, life smoothed out on the surface. I was making music. I was running the crypto channel. My ex-wife was steady in her job. The crypto channel started producing consistent income. We hit a period of stability. From sometime in late 2023 into 2024, there was not much drama to report. We were grinding. We were functioning. Things looked calm from the outside. But underneath, the unresolved stuff was still there, quietly accumulating, waiting for whatever would come next.
In 2024, after about six months away from video games, I started playing again. My ex-wife was furious. It was the same story we had already lived through multiple times. You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do. I had made a bunch of music albums, but I missed gaming. I found a game called Marvel Snap. It was similar to Gods Unchained, but with a much bigger audience and no NFTs. It was even more addictive. In early 2024, with solid crypto income coming in, I spent over two thousand dollars on Marvel Snap cards without much hesitation. I started streaming it on Twitch and slid right back into gaming. At the same time, I was still making music. Creatively, I was on fire. I was producing an absurd amount of content.
At one point in 2023, I had as many as eight YouTube channels across different topics. I deleted several of them, then made new ones. Over the years, I ended up with four separate Jerry Banfield gaming channels, plus gaming videos posted on at least two other channels. I had a crypto reviews channel. I was everywhere. I had money coming in. People were scheduling calls on jerrybanfield.com where they were paying me three hundred dollars an hour to talk to me on Zoom about crypto, and I was turning around and spending lots of that money on video games. I was chasing Twitch Partner again, this time with Marvel Snap. When I played it on my tablet, the addiction was vicious. I was live streaming constantly. I was playing during my time with the kids and even got them their own accounts to play the game too. It started to become obvious that something deeper was going on.
I had a breakthrough when I realized that my Marvel Snap addiction was covering up how uncomfortable and unsatisfied I was in my marriage. I kept asking myself why I could not stop. In 2024 alone, I quit Marvel Snap three separate times. Each time, I made videos saying I was done, that the game was addictive, that people should not play it. Then two weeks later, I would come back and spend more money while releasing another I’m back video. I told my ex-wife how much I was spending, and she was furious. I was embarrassed. I shared openly in AA that I had a new addiction. At the same time, I had not seen the girl from yoga in over a year, and I still thought about her almost every day. Every yoga class, I still looked for her. Every woman who was not her felt like a disappointment. If you keep circling back to a habit you cannot seem to quit and you sense it is covering up something deeper, I am glad to help you look at it honestly when you schedule a private call with me and bring it to me on our call.
Around July 2024, after quitting Marvel Snap for the third time, I got rid of all my gaming systems again. I had bought a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X … again. The kids were playing constantly, glued to tablets and consoles. I shut it all down. I quit Marvel Snap and told myself, fuck it. If quitting gaming means I finally have to face my marriage, then that is what I am going to do.
That same month, I flew to Michigan by myself for my nephew’s graduation. I really wanted to go. My ex-wife did not. She said she was too busy, gave the usual reasons. Earlier that year, around New Year’s at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, we had taken the kids to Michigan in the winter. They absolutely loved it. We went to Frankenmuth, went ice skating, saw snow, and spent time with family. It was a beautiful trip. Because of that, my ex-wife did not want to go again in the summer. So in July, I flew up by myself to attend my nephew’s graduation party.
On that trip, something crystallized with shocking clarity. I knew I needed to get divorced. I did not want to be in the marriage anymore. It was not a dramatic revelation. It was calm, certain, and undeniable. My ex-wife and I had already had multiple fights since the yoga crush where she had essentially told me that if I wanted someone like that, I should go be with her, that she would cooperate, and that everything would be fine. Strangely, even though part of me had fantasized about that outcome, when she actually said it, I shut it down. I told her no, we had to stay together. I told myself there was no point in being with someone else, because then I would have to deal with them and still deal with my ex-wife. The truth was more uncomfortable. I did not feel like I had time to get divorced. My work consumed me completely. I was obsessed with making videos, producing content, staying relevant. The idea of navigating a divorce felt impossible not because it was emotionally hard, but because I was too addicted to my work to step away and deal with it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Why Deleting Everything Finally Made Life Make Sense
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Life Made Sense Again
I was amazed at how much better I felt the moment I deleted my podcast. For the first time in years, my life made sense. Before that, everything felt like failure. I had tried to build a successful career as an online influencer, and every single time I climbed to the top of something, it either ended in self-sabotage through burnout, or I lost my mind chasing the next level, or the platforms and algorithms took me down. Nothing had stuck. Nothing had lasted.
But once I deleted everything, the story flipped. Suddenly, all those failures, all those meltdowns, all those takedowns, they made sense. If the whole point of the journey was to reach a place where I unplug completely—and then help other people unplug—then none of it was wasted. It was all leading me here. That realization was one of the best feelings I have ever had. After years of believing my life was meaningless, of hearing my own family say I had pissed away every opportunity and wound up 40 years old with nothing to show for it, I finally felt the opposite. I had something to show for it. I had clarity. I knew what I needed to do.
The more I started talking to people in real life, the clearer the guidance became. I was shocked to feel such a strong desire to talk with others face-to-face. I remembered how powerful it had been in 2020 and again in 2024 when I unplugged for stretches of time. Back then, I noticed how much better I felt not listening to endless content online. But this time it hit me on a deeper level.
For years, I had justified all the time I spent on YouTube, Facebook, X, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok as research. I told myself I needed to watch what was happening in the algorithm, to stay informed, to keep up with trends. That’s how I dominated Facebook in the beginning—I studied what was happening there. That’s how I made big money on Udemy—I watched the system closely. Same with YouTube and crypto, same with Twitch and TikTok. Always watching. Always studying. Always consuming. I didn’t see until much later how destructive it was to spend so much time watching other people instead of living my own life. It wasn’t just about wasting hours. It changed how I thought. It blocked me from wanting to connect with people in person.
Deleting everything changed that overnight. Suddenly I was eager, even desperate, to spend time with people in real life. No podcasts, no TV, no music, no video games. What do you do when you cut all of that out? I reached out to people who I thought could help me figure out what to do next. People with life experience. People who had walked other paths.
The first clear call to action came quickly: pawn my video game consoles. Even after deleting all my channels, I was holding on to the idea that I could just play games casually, without creating content around them. But I knew deep down that was flawed. I wouldn’t just play casually. I’d end up watching videos about the games, looking for strategies, dipping into the same cycle that always pulled me back into content creation. The consoles had to go.
In my conversations with people, I kept noticing how many of them struggled with the same thing I was going through. Parents, spouses, kids—they told me stories about how addicted their families were to screens, videos, and games. I heard repeatedly that this was one of the biggest issues in their lives. That’s when it clicked: my extreme journey could help people. Because I had gone all-in, further than most people ever would, my choice to unplug carried weight. I had deleted more, sacrificed more, given up more than the average person would even consider. That made me an example people could learn from. Because so many people I talk to are quietly fighting the same battle with screens in their own homes, and if you're one of them, you can schedule a private call with me and we'll figure it out together.
The more I talked, the more I wished I had something tangible to give people. Something they could hold in their hands. That thought brought me back to writing books. I met with a local author who also worked as a real estate agent, coach, and speaker. She told me that out of everything she did, the one thing that made people curious was when she said she was an author. That stuck with me.
I remembered that I had already thought about becoming an author before, back when I was considering what to do next. In 2024, I had failed at it. I told myself it was too hard, that it didn’t make sense compared to video. Now I looked back and thought: I should have taken that year to write books. If I had, I’d already have a dozen published. Imagine meeting someone and being able to hand them one of twelve different books on topics like sobriety or unplugging from technology. Imagine how powerful that would be as a lead magnet for coaching or speaking.
Books could do more than bring people in—they could help them. Someone going through what I went through could read my story, feel less alone, and then meet me in person to talk about it. That combination of being both an author and someone you could actually meet face-to-face felt like the path I had been searching for. From that conversation, it was obvious: being an author, a speaker, and a coach was exactly what I wanted to do. If you want to talk with me about deleting everything and being an author yourself, you will love booking a session with me at jerrybanfield.com.
Finding My Workflow as an Author
I love creating, and writing books feels like the purest creative outlet I’ve ever had. On Saturday, September 6, 2025, I spent hours dictating this very book, from the introduction all the way through to where I am now. That means I created two thirds of this entire book in one day although I have taken almost a month to edit it. My process is simple but powerful: I dictate into voice memos, then I run those memos through ChatGPT to polish them into readable writing. Over the last couple of months, I’ve worked hard to figure out the best way to be an author in 2025, and this workflow is the breakthrough. It takes what I’m best at—talking off the top of my head—and transforms it into something people can actually read.
If you want to hear about the beginning of my journey as an author, you can read Author in St. Petersburg, which documents my daily diary entries during the time I first started experimenting with books. Right after that conversation, I tried everything again—dictating, pulling transcripts from old videos, typing directly on the computer. The difference this time was that I refused to quit. Where I had failed before was simply in not trying hard enough, giving up too easily, and not finding a workflow that made sense.
The first big breakthrough was realizing I had to dictate. Dictating is lightning fast compared to typing. I hate spending an hour on the computer just to come up with 1,000 or maybe 2,000 words. In the last three hours today, I’ve probably dictated 20,000 or even 30,000 words, compared to the 5,000 or 10,000 I would have managed typing. What’s wild is that my dictation, once polished through ChatGPT, actually sounds better than the writing I do myself. It’s humbling, even baffling, but I’m grateful to finally have a system that lets me produce books quickly.
I had already drafted a book about technology addiction that got up to around 40,000 words, but it was a mess—diary entries scattered everywhere, no clear thread. It didn’t feel like the book I truly wanted to write. While experimenting, I asked ChatGPT for book title ideas, and one jumped out at me: I Was Famous on the Internet. The moment I saw it, I thought, that’s it. It sounded so good I assumed someone had already written it. I checked. Nobody had. This was my book!
Over the next month, I tried different workflows for it. At one point, I had over 100,000 words by pulling in video transcripts from the exact days things happened. For example, when I quit gaming, I grabbed the transcript of me saying it that day and dropped it into the manuscript as a diary entry. That draft spanned my entire life, from before I was born and choosing my parents, all the way up through the stories I’m telling here.
Eventually, I cut it down to around 50,000 words, but when I looked at it this week, I realized it was unusable. Too scattered, too chaotic, not immersive enough for someone who didn’t already know me. Maybe a hardcore fan would have appreciated the detail, but a normal reader needed a cohesive story. I had to accept the hard truth: I needed to dictate the entire book again, from scratch while maybe publishing the version with transcripts later.
That’s what I did today. So here I am, having dictated everything you’ve read in this book so far in a single day, while my ex-wife was out with the kids at the movies. I don’t even want to sit in front of a screen in a theater anymore. Instead, I stayed home and created a book. I’ve started giving out Author in St. Petersburg in person, and the responses have been incredible. I’m so grateful to have gone through the full arc of my story—how I was famous on the internet—and to now be shaping it into something lasting. We’ll see what else I can add that will truly bring it full circle.
Questions
Now that I’ve shared the story of how I was famous on the internet, I want to shift into answering the questions people usually ask about my journey online. One of the most common questions I get sounds something like this: Jerry, are you saying the people who work at all these tech companies are evil? Another version is: What can we actually do about this system we’re stuck in?
The first thing I want to make clear is that the most powerful belief I live by is this: I am the Creator of my reality. Truly, this entire reality is my creation. Yet one of the dominant messages the internet puts out is the opposite—that you are not the creator of your reality, that you are a victim, a prisoner, a pawn in a world run by someone else. Whether that someone else is portrayed as God, AI, corporations, or government, the story is the same: you don’t have control, you’re just surviving.
To me, the foundation of a better world is being sovereign beings, thinking for ourselves. And what I’ve seen from years of living online is that using the internet makes it very hard to think for yourself. It looks like there are endless points of view, but what you’re really being fed is a carefully curated narrative—and then a controlled opposition against it. It’s like elections. Both major political parties are essentially two sides of the same coin. There’s the illusion of choice, and yes, sometimes the outcome shifts slightly, but the deeper system remains the same. The rhetoric is different, the words are different, the emotional triggers are different, but underneath, the same control mechanisms are in place.
One of the realizations that helped me get off the internet was hearing someone say that the future is going to be divided between sovereign thinkers and people trapped in groupthink. At first, I felt reassured. I thought, I’m sovereign, I’m thinking for myself. Then it hit me. No, I wasn’t. I was just one of the herd, hanging on someone else’s words, listening to their ideas, shaping my reality through their lens. The truth was undeniable: if I wanted to be sovereign, I needed to unplug. If you're wrestling with what unplugging would actually mean for your own life, you don't have to map it out alone — you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll talk through your own version of it.
I don’t mean cutting out the internet completely. I’ll talk later about the practical details—like how to promote yourself and do business locally without feeding these platforms. For now, I want to zoom out to the bigger picture. These systems, as toxic as they feel, are still our creation.
Take the big platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Why are they so powerful? Because billions of dollars poured into marketing them, making them dominant, and then cementing their dominance by buying out competition. Facebook swallowed Instagram. TikTok bought its way into cultural dominance with relentless marketing backed by staggering sums of money. These platforms didn’t become giants by accident. They became giants because people invested in them, because money fueled their rise. And where did the money come from? Us. The users.
Are some of the people running these companies into things we’d call evil? Sure. I’ve crossed paths with people whose worldview felt cold, manipulative, and destructive. But most of the people working at these companies are just regular people doing a job. They’re getting paid, feeding their families, surviving. That’s where the real problem lies.
In AA, there’s a line in the Big Book: “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.” I see that everywhere in the digital world. People make moral compromises because their paycheck demands it. They take jobs where they do things they wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of, because they need the money. That’s how good people become cogs in a system that others look at and call evil.
It was the same for me. Most people in my position wouldn’t have deleted everything. They would have just kept saying whatever they needed to say to keep getting paid. That’s what I see repeatedly online. Creators aren’t telling you the truth; they’re telling you what they need to say to survive and get paid. The platform employees are doing the same. The executives are doing the same. When survival and self-interest take over, the bigger picture gets lost.
The internet is full of people chasing material wealth, status, fame, views, prestige—all the empty numbers. Few are asking how this affects humanity. That’s the problem. That’s the trap. And that’s why, for me, unplugging was the only way forward.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Clearing Out the Old to Make Room
Originally published August 6, 2025.
This is my journal entry from August 6, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.
Today was another clearing-out day. I gathered roughly a thousand dollars’ worth of monitors, lighting equipment, stands, and microphone arms and delivered them to a video production business I found on Google Maps. Selling that kind of gear at a pawn shop didn’t seem realistic, and I wanted it gone quickly. Keeping old equipment in the house makes me feel as though I’m standing still. I want to write books, but it’s hard to pour myself into that work while surrounded by relics of my past life in video production.
Clearing out the old to make room for the new isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a practical necessity. Still, I noticed a flicker of resistance before making the call. Part of me wanted to just dump everything at Salvation Army and be done. Yet these small decisions matter. Choosing where something goes can make a real difference. The owner of the video production business was thrilled. He said it was enough gear for one of their interns to set up a full studio at home — essentially the same kind of livestreaming setup I used to run. That made me happy. It felt better to give the equipment to people who could truly use it, rather than to a donation center where someone might look at it and wonder what it even was.
That resistance I felt — the irrational urge to avoid a new place or interaction — is the same mental block that keeps people from opportunities. Today I was glad I pushed through it.
This morning I played tennis with a friend, starting at 10:30. The first three games were a disaster; my shots were sloppy and I couldn’t find my rhythm. Then something shifted. I started hitting clean, confident shots and took four of the next five games. At that point, my friend said the heat was getting to him. We stopped at 4–4. He felt bad about ending early on a tie, but I told him the real solution was to adjust. August tennis in St. Petersburg at 10:30 a.m. is brutal. Starting earlier makes far more sense. He’ll need to rearrange his schedule, but I’m looking forward to trying again a couple of hours earlier next week, when the sun isn’t as oppressive.
The game was a reminder that sometimes surrendering, making an adjustment, and accepting reality is the smartest path forward. I had warmed up with a power yoga class that morning, and while I’ll miss that class when we move tennis earlier, I’m fortunate to have so many yoga options. I love the teachers, the students, and the sense of community, and I’m always open to deepening relationships or making new connections.
I’ve also been expanding my network of massage therapists. I don’t want to get stuck without someone to see. Four months ago, I met a girl at my yoga studio who was working toward her massage license. She came to mind again today, and I realized she should be licensed by now. I’d held off contacting her until she was ready or I saw her again in person, but today I finally sent a message. She responded enthusiastically. Starting out as a new massage therapist can be difficult — you get scheduled heavily or not at all, make very little money, and struggle to build a client base. She offered to work at my place, her place, or the spa where she’s employed. I chose her place so she could keep the full payment without a middleman. We set an appointment for Saturday, and I already have another massage scheduled for Monday with an existing therapist. This is partly about trying something new, but also about having enough therapists in rotation to get massages every four or five days instead of just once a week.
I took the kids to an ice cream shop, stopped by PetSmart, went to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and wrapped up another good day. The only hiccup was my son melting down in the middle of his haircut — a sharp reminder that even the best days have their unpredictable moments.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.