The Malaise of Video Essays

The emergence of the video essay as a cultural phenomenon is more than just a quirky trend; it’s a symptom of the West’s broader failure to harness and cultivate its productive forces, a visible marker of our economies slowly unraveling. On a macro scale, it reveals a profound mismanagement of labor—watching as a generation’s potential is funneled into crafting endless hours of content, dissecting Shrek or analyzing video games, instead of engaging in work that builds or sustains society. In China, the youth are driven by the desire to contribute to tangible progress, to build, innovate, and drive their nation forward. But in America, the dream has curdled. We’ve settled into stagnant niches of pseudo-intellectualism, finding comfort in the shallow pursuit of online validation within a system that has long since given up on real advancement.

Our failure is glaring. We no longer even pretend that we can send our youth to universities to study subjects that matter—if they do manage to attend, we burden them with crippling debt, forcing them into absurd career paths where ad revenue from lengthy video essays becomes a lifeline. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that these pursuits have some intrinsic value, when in truth, they are little more than distractions in a society that no longer knows how to channel its workforce effectively. This should be a source of deep embarrassment—a nation once proud of its industrial might, now reduced to a hollow shell, its workforce chasing clicks and likes in the absence of real opportunity.

Capitalism, with its endless rhetoric of innovation and efficiency, has failed us. If capitalism truly optimized labor and resources as it claims, we would see the fruits of that efficiency in our infrastructure—in high-speed rail lines connecting cities like San Antonio and Austin, enhancing mobility and productivity. In China, such connections are not just ideas but realities, tangible proof of a system that recognizes the value of investing in its people and their ability to move, work, and create. But here, in the heart of the capitalist West, we languish. Our labor force is squandered on content creation that serves no purpose, producing nothing of real value, a testament to the unproductive reality of our so-called efficient system.

The irony is stark—capitalism, in its current form, is profoundly unproductive, a fact laid bare for anyone who takes a cursory glance at the vast ocean of content on YouTube. The platform itself is a monument to our collective failure, a digital wasteland where the intellectual potential of a generation is frittered away, not on building a better future, but on the futile pursuit of relevance in a world that no longer offers them a meaningful role. In this sense, the video essay is not just entertainment—it’s a quiet cry of despair, a reflection of a society that has lost its way, where the dreams of the young have been reduced to the pursuit of fleeting digital fame in a collapsing economy.