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.
Fantasy, Lust, and Emotional Infidelity
I hope I’ve made it clear in this book that the damage I’ve experienced in my interpersonal relationships as a result of the internet and media hasn’t always been obvious. It’s not something you can see right on the surface. With things like alcoholism, addiction, or even jobs where you work so much you’re never around, the consequences are often obvious. But you’d think that being a content creator who works at home, who is there to pick the kids up from school consistently, and with my ex-wife working at home too, that environment theoretically should have been perfect for a great relationship. It wasn’t, because the problems were sneaky.
When I finally got honest about the emotional infidelity I carried for years, it hit me how much I had been checked out. I had years of crushes on other women, constantly thinking about a girl at yoga or a massage therapist. I never did anything physical, but in my mind, I was distracted. I was missing out on romance with my ex-wife because I was so often off in fantasy. That makes sense in an online environment, though, where fantasy is all you have.
Many content creators make a living off these fantasies. For example, I remember one very attractive girl on Facebook Gaming with a verified page and about as many followers as me. One night, she went on a rant during her livestream about how bad her mental health was and how annoyed she was with her viewers. She said that when she was single, her viewers gave her so much more money and watched so much longer. As soon as she got a boyfriend and started talking about him, half her audience disappeared and three-quarters of her donations stopped. She thought it was really unfair because she wanted viewers to support her in having a real-life relationship.
I thought she was naïve. I remember thinking, why do you think these guys are watching you? They’re watching because of lust and fantasy. They’re not watching because you’re good at the game or because you have an entertaining personality. I know because I watched her sometimes for a little lust myself. I observed that she sucked at Warzone compared to me and her average personality did nothing to enhance her boring gameplay. She was just a regular girl who livestreamed, except she was pretty enough to get some serious lust vibes going. How sad is it to picture me with my beautiful real life wife putting the kids to bed while I’m watching her play Warzone like a bot and complain about how she’s not getting the money she thinks she deserves?
That’s what happens when you consume all this content online. You fill your mind with people you can’t actually interact with. You get used to loving and supporting people you can’t see, touch, or have a face-to-face conversation with. That creates a sense of scarcity. You look around and think there aren’t any pretty girls around, or no decent guys around, or no inspiring people near you.
I remember listening to so many of Wayne Dyer’s books. His words were inspirational and transformational, yet he got divorced. His wife told him she was leaving him because he was never around. He was always traveling, selling books, giving talks, appearing on shows. They had seven kids together, and she told him, “You’re never around.” She got a boyfriend because she wanted someone who would actually spend time with her, someone present.
Being Present While Absent
The crazy thing about being a content creator is that you can end up having the same experience as someone who is never around, even while you are physically present. Because I was so used to lusting after people online, I carried that mindset into real life. When I was a top 20 Facebook partner, I spent all kinds of time watching other Facebook partners. Then I’d go out in real life and have experiences that I couldn’t share with anyone because nobody I knew was watching Facebook Gaming creators. I had all these things I wanted to talk about, but when I showed up at yoga, all I really did was lust. I lusted after people I hardly talked to.
That left me feeling isolated, because when people had conversations with me, I didn’t know what to say. The things filling my mind were all online. When someone wanted to talk about their kids, I got bored and wanted to get away as soon as possible, because the things that were exciting to me were the things I was doing online.
What I noticed after just a month of deleting everything online was that my marriage was suddenly front and center. Anytime I unplugged from the internet even for a week, my ex-wife and I would end up having a fight, because the problems in our marriage couldn’t be ignored anymore. Now, when I’m with people in person, I feel so excited to listen. I want to know every detail of their life, because I’m not filling my head with the endless details of people I can’t actually meet online. I’ve also noticed it’s much easier to really see people instead if lusting. If I can’t see you in person or spend time with you, then I don’t need to be thinking about you. And when I do see people in person, I see their depth.
It’s very hard to see depth online. It’s easy to be shallow, to notice only how pretty someone is, or how smart or inspiring they seem. But in person you get a much deeper impression. My sister gave me an example of this on the phone today. My ex-wife and I had visited Michigan for our usual weeklong trip to see my family in June, and after we left, my sister told me she had the thought that we might get divorced. There were no outward signs, no conflicts anyone observed, but she felt like it made sense for us.
That’s how sneaky this stuff online is. It’s not obvious how it affects you, but it does, and the impact is bigger than you’d believe. Just yesterday, I spent two hours with a girl I did a free life coaching session with right after I deleted everything online. She told me she wanted to upload videos to Instagram to get clients for her business. At the same time, she said she felt like she had to, that she was being pushed into it, and she didn’t actually want to. I asked her why she didn’t want to. She said, “I just don’t know any other way to get clients.”
I told her, if you give up on Instagram, you might discover other ways. If you think Instagram can get you clients, you won’t explore the alternatives. For what she wanted to do, I told her, she would need a higher level of trust and connection, which usually requires an in-person experience. But you will struggle to see the alternatives until you stop relying on what you’re already using.
She admitted she had been sold on the idea of Instagram many times. She pointed to another creator she follows who seems to be making great money just by posting pictures, and she said, “That’s what I want.” I asked her, do you really know what that creator is doing to get that result? Do you know if she’s pushing certain narratives behind the scenes? Do you know if she’s actually happy? Do you know if she’s using bots to boost her account? What if there are hidden dark sides that are required in most cases to get the results you’re after? Would you compromise your integrity to get what you want?
She said no. Then she asked, “Aren’t there people out there who are just good people using these platforms?” I said yes, but from my perspective, the ones who are getting a good return on investment that way are a minority. Most of the people you see are like me—willing to do whatever it takes to get your attention, consumed by the addiction of being a content creator.
The Illusion of Success and the Reality Behind It
For years, I made it all look so glamorous. People thought I was so successful, and I got so much applause. It was ridiculous when I was one of the top 20 Facebook partners—how often people would just come and drop me a $50 tip, how much people wanted what I had. It was amazing how many people thought I was successful just because the numbers were going in my direction. But as I documented earlier, if you looked at my personal life, did that look successful? Did it look successful that I wasn’t present for my ex-wife and my children? That I was always distracted by what I was doing online? That I struggled to have the amount of quality conversations I have today because I was always thinking about my next video?
Does it sound like success that I was making tens of thousands a month gaming online but struggling to talk with my ex-wife in a loving and understanding way about our sex life? Does it sound like success to make a bunch of money one month and have it all go away the next? Or to get addicted to a video game instead of facing the troubles in my marriage? That’s the thing—you can’t see all that stuff. When you watch and look at what people post online, today it’s hard to tell if it’s even a real person or AI, and that’s probably only going to get worse in the future.
When you watch all this stuff on screens, you can’t see what’s really going on because you don’t have enough data. But when you meet people in person, you can observe so much more depth. You can see the truth of what somebody has, and you can have conversations that are unmoderated, unfiltered, and uncensored. There are so many topics online that are censored, and you don’t even notice it because you’re so used to the censorship that you take it for granted.
I remember listening to historical fiction books and thinking everyone in one of those dictatorial countries like the Soviet Union was a total fool for believing state propaganda. But what if today the propaganda is just so advanced and we’re so used to it that we don’t even know it exists anymore? That’s the way I see the internet today. It’s like the internet is the matrix. And I would expand the internet to include all media such as TV, movies, and music too.
Now, that’s not to say you can’t jump into the matrix and get some clients on a website or a Google Business listing or learn something on ChatGPT. But these tools are very limited. When I ask ChatGPT about crypto, if I don’t ask a very well-informed question, I get very uninformed, poor answers. Even though I use ChatGPT to help take these dictations into books, if I don’t have everything set up properly, it butchers what I’ve said and I must fix it, or I must run it through again and again, or it drifts. Yes, there are good things to be found online, but you must be very careful—just the same way you’d be careful going into a bad neighborhood to hang out with a friend.
I’m really grateful today that I unplugged a few months ago. If I hadn’t deleted everything in June 2025 ago, I don’t think I’d be getting divorced today. I think my ex-wife and I would still be stuck in the same cycle. We would have been unable to move forward because my ex-wife is very loyal and willing to accept an unacceptable environment. She couldn’t have a nice conversation with me and meet me where I really understood her until I was present enough to do that.
And I’m grateful that a few months after deleting everything, I was present enough over the last couple of days to have a nice conversation about, “Yes, you’re right. Let’s get divorced. Let’s do it in as nice a way as possible.” I had laid some foundations and helped people get to know me better with the letters to my family so that I could then be prepared to have the support I needed. What I can tell you is I would not have wanted to get divorced while I was creating online because I’d have uploaded so many videos about my divorce or I’d have felt like there was something I couldn’t talk about in my content, and it would have been a disaster.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.