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.
The Highest Cost
As I dictate this, it is September 28, 2025 and I’m doing what I hope is the final first draft edit before publishing on October 8, 2025. Two weeks ago, my ex-wife, my ex-wife, and I agreed that we are going to get divorced. Our marriage has been less than the full joy we are capable of for years. We have both been trying so hard to make ourselves fit together, but the reality is we have grown apart. Sobriety and education have changed me into someone very different than the man she started dating. Motherhood has changed her too, and now we are no longer aligned in the most important areas of our lives.
I want more children; she does not. I have an abundant mindset with money, where most of what comes in, I give away or spend quickly. She has a mindset of saving and working. The books I write feel far too personal and vulnerable for her, and she has made it clear she does not want to be featured in them going forward which is unavoidable if we are married. Even in health, we are far apart. I told her I will be writing a book soon on my views, and she admitted she fears getting sick because I have made it clear I am not interested in taking care of someone who is sick. I see illness as something people create for themselves, and that terrifies her. I love having sex every day and have been neglecting our romance for years which has left us consistently frustrated in the bedroom.
My ex-wife told me she knows there is a woman out there who would be very turned on by me, who would love to be my partner, and that it is unfair to both of us to keep going like this. She loves the friendship we share, she loves the kind of parent I am, and she loves raising our kids together. Yet she wants someone else to enjoy me as a husband, and I want that too. Meanwhile, she wants to be single for a while and discover who she really is without trying to fit herself to be with someone else.
As I finish this book, what I keep thinking is: how long did everything I did on the internet distract me from what was happening in my marriage? I know I was unhappy as far back as 2018, when my ex-wife said she did not want any more kids after having our daughter my daughter and our son my son. That was enough for her. She wanted to get her life back and not just be a stay-at-home mom forever—she wanted a career again.
When I made $100,000+ in profit on Facebook in 2021, she really enjoyed that time because I was paying the bills again after years of financial insecurity. Back in 2019 and 2020, after my overly ambitious business venture destroyed our finances, she became deeply committed to her work. Since then, she has mostly carried the stress of being our primary income provider. Meanwhile, over the last three years, I have been consistently emotionally unfaithful to her—getting crushes on girls I barely knew, being more thoughtful about them than I was with her.
I always showed up for the marriage in practical ways. I helped take care of the house and the children. I mowed the lawn, took the cars for service, and maintained my life to fit in with her schedule for the kids. Yet how often was I absent-minded? How often did I neglect romance with my ex-wife while imagining what it would be like to be with another woman? How much did I resent her for not wanting more children and for not supporting my work?
A week ago, I wrote her a letter laying out my wrongs in our marriage. I told her I would do whatever it took to make things better. I said I would admit I was wrong and completely change my life if it meant we could stay together. She said she did not want to be in a relationship where someone had to be wrong and change themselves that much. She told me we both deserve relationships where we are appreciated as we are. She said it is not fair to be with someone under the premise that they must change. I agree with her. I told her I would love to have an amicable divorce, one where we help each other through the process, love each other through it, and show people what that looks like. I want to show our kids a bigger picture of life with more people to love and places we are welcome.
You might wonder why I am writing about this here, in a book about being famous on the internet. The answer is simple: where I am today, and what has happened in my marriage, is completely tied up with everything I did online.
How Distraction Erodes Love
One of the biggest pain points in our marriage for my ex-wife has always been finances and money. Because of my focus over the last decade on being a content creator, I put myself in a position where things were very unstable. And when you have a wife and family, living in an environment that unstable is stressful for everyone. Especially today, you might think it sounds outdated to say this, but many women are still deeply turned on and appreciative of a man who can consistently produce income—someone who doesn’t leave them in financial insecurity, someone they can trust to provide. Even though my ex-wife likes having a career and would not want to admit it, she was far more turned on and much happier during the years when I was consistently providing income through Udemy and crypto.
Between 2015 and 2018, I paid all the bills, gave her thousands of dollars every month, and she could depend on me. She has hated our finances in the years since then, when things have been so unstable. I ask myself: what if I had worked and focused my life offline instead? I would have enjoyed much more stability. Sure, things can happen in local in-person work too, but on average, life online as a content creator tends to be much more unstable. If I had chosen to work on being a local author, coach, and speaker a decade ago, my income probably would have been incredibly stable over these years. It would have created opportunities, connections, and real value. If I had done that instead of chasing everything online, it’s possible we might not be getting divorced today.
At the same time, it’s also possible that if I had truly been paying attention, we would have divorced sooner. Doing all this stuff online was shockingly distracting. Even though I often only spent three or four hours a day, seven days a week, making and uploading videos, mentally I was totally consumed. I was constantly obsessed, always thinking about it. Today I wonder if my ex-wife and I might have gotten divorced five or six years ago, back when she made it clear she didn’t want more kids and I made it clear I did. If I had been fully present, maybe we would have separated then, and both of us could have had those years to move on—me to start a family with someone else, her to find someone better suited to her or to be single—rather than staying stuck in a marriage we struggled to keep alive.
All the time I spent online also made me less compassionate and less empathetic toward others. The online environment promotes selfishness, self-centeredness, and doing whatever it takes to get what you want. Being with people in person, on the other hand, generally encourages empathy, compassion, and consideration. I think about how selfish I have been about intimacy in my marriage with my ex-wife. It’s perfectly reasonable that I wanted intimacy to be a regular, enjoyable part of our relationship, but the way I went about it with her was not compassionate or reasonable. I pressured her, I made my frustration her problem, and I wasn’t fair to her about it. That kind of selfishness makes sense in someone shaped by years online, where it’s all about getting what you want, but it has no place in a loving marriage.
I remember a year ago, when I was trying to quit Marvel Snap, thinking to myself that the game was a convenient way to avoid my marriage and the discomfort I felt in it. If I quit Marvel Snap, I would have to face just how unhappy I really was in my marriage. When I finally did face it, my online work was still distracting me so much that it was difficult to keep my attention on what truly mattered. The biggest barrier to deleting all my accounts online was the knowledge that I would no longer get away with ignoring my marriage.
Marriage, Work, and the Loneliness of Creation
On the surface, I loved the idea of staying married and being one of those couples who had been together for 50 years, pointing to that as proof of success. But the reality is that both of us were struggling for years to keep the marriage joyful. That said, from the outside we often looked like we were having lots of fun and from the inside our life generally felt happy most days. We absolutely made the best of our marriage, and I don’t regret that. What I’m saying, though, is that the online environment was so distracting that I spent years in a marriage where I wasn’t fully present. I was very often withdrawn, obsessed with my work, either talking to my ex-wife about how great things were going and all my new ideas, or complaining about how awful things were and how unfair it all was. My ex-wife got tired of hearing about my work a decade ago, and she has endured ten straight years of listening to me go on and on about it.
One of the reasons I gave for not wanting to stay married was that I wanted someone who would support my work. With the way I write books now, along with coaching and speaking, I think it would be much easier for a partner to support me. But as a content creator, it’s very difficult for someone to give that support because the work is so volatile and sensational if you’re going to be successful, or else it is so consuming if you’re struggling just to pay the bills.
I’ve noticed that my life seems very typical of full-time online content creators. I know a guy who became incredibly successful teaching courses on Udemy, making tens of thousands of dollars a month. I coached him, I showed him how to do what I did, and now his Udemy earnings have surpassed mine. He managed it without controversy, without being over the top the way I often was, and by consistently applying the essential strategies I taught him. For almost a decade, he has poured effort into his courses, and now he earns an incredible passive income every month on Udemy that he barely has to work for.
Yet in all that time, he has made very little space for dating. Yes, he has dated here and there, had a girlfriend now and then, but he even tolerated having a long-distance girlfriend he didn’t see for a year or two because he was so distracted with his work. The relationship just wasn’t a priority. It didn’t matter to him much whether he had a girlfriend or not. That is crazy to me, because now that I’m getting divorced, one of my first priorities is to start dating again. I love having a girlfriend and am very excited to see who the next one will be.
And yet all the time people spend on media platforms—and all the time I have spent on them—has distracted me from being present in my relationships. Within a month of deleting those platforms, I started writing letters to people in my life. I wrote to my in-laws to share honestly about where my ex-wife and I were in our marriage. I wrote to my brother to explain why I wasn’t going to come to his wedding. I wrote to my sisters about the pink elephant in the room of our father and my experiences with him, along with my journey of getting sober. These are things I might have done years earlier if I hadn’t been so consumed by being online.
Of course, you could argue that any career could have the same effect. You might say I could have been a doctor or a lawyer and been just as consumed by my work. That’s true. But the difference is that with those fields, you know what you’re getting into. It’s obvious that they are all-consuming, and you must be intentional about separating work from personal life. With content creation, you don’t realize how consuming it is until you are in it. You imagine you’ll just upload a few videos, earn some income, sell a course or two, and it won’t be a big deal. Maybe some people can manage it that way, but what I see with most people is that either it ends up being a total waste of their time, or they would have been much better off focusing on real life and real relationships.
Even if you do reach financial success, it costs the exact freedom you thought online income would provide. You become locked into the numbers, distracted far more than you ever thought possible. Looking back, I think if I had really been paying attention, my ex-wife and I probably would have divorced years ago. But I was so consumed with content creation that I didn’t have the time or mental space to fully face my marriage. At most, I had moments of getting upset, arguing, demanding more sex, or telling my ex-wife I had yet another business idea that this time, I promised, would be different.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.