This fits into the stereotype of Millennials as entitled. He makes 500k a month, but can't get off the hamster wheel? Poor soul.
This fits into the stereotype of Millennials as entitled. He makes 500k a month, but can't get off the hamster wheel? Poor soul.
The guy streams 70 hours per week minimum[1]. That two day -more like one day- break cost him over $100,000, and cut his following (and salary, I guess? No clue how Twitch works.) by almost 20%[2]. There's no option to pick more PTO and trade off salary. He's stuck with this. Even as a "temporary" solution, that shit will take years off your life, and there are people who do this to just scrape by.
It's illustrative of how shitty a "profession" it is that the top streamers have to put in such an insane amount of work with no compromise ever.
[1]: https://www.twitchmetrics.net/c/19571641-ninja [2]: https://kotaku.com/ninja-takes-two-day-break-loses-40-000-su...
At a very conservative 3.33% annual withdrawal rate, which all but guarantees that your capital will grow faster than you spend it in the long term, after one year of work he could live on an annual income of $100k, forever, without working another day.
I guess it depends on your definition of "luxurious", but $100k free-and-clear annually buys you a much nicer lifestyle than most people have!
By residual income I mean things like being paid to appear at events and sponsor brands. Very low effort work. To be fair, that'll eventually dwindle away, but if he plays his chips right then he could coast on that kind of stuff for a long time.
I'm sure your answer is to just ignore it all. No problem, if you're a robot. Then there's the pressure that comes along with quitting a super-high income job. There's a voice in the back of your head saying "You are incredibly lucky to be here. Quitting is crazy. You'll never get a chance like this again."
This isn't a job that comes with a lot of security. If someone like Ninja left the scene for 1-2 years, there's no guarantees he'd ever be able to come back and have the same impact again. The odds are he couldn't.
What pressure? Don’t want to feel pressure from thousands of anonymous people on Twitch? Don’t go on Twitch. Problem solved.
Similarly, know how to avoid all the negative social aspects of Twitter that so many celebs whine about? Don’t go on Twitter!
It’s the internet. It’s not real life. Why is this so hard?
You act as if just disappearing as a celebrity is some easy job. Especially one in this area (Twitch), where the audience is more pervasive. There's plenty of celebrities out there who try to filter out criticism online but can't help themselves but get consumed by it. Kevin Durant is a great example. The guy has no reason to care about what some kids say about him on social media, but he still gets sucked into conversations about him online.
If you haven't been in the situation before, I think it's pretty unfair to just say "ignore it".
Just like if you're a celebrity, you don't have to do drugs. Or drive fast. Or engage in any other self-destructive behavior.
This guy has a choice. He chooses to remain engaged even though he knows it's bad for him. If he's not able to choose otherwise, then it sounds like an addiction, or a mental illness.
Then do the pain for one year and retire. How many people do you think would happily take that sacrifice? The degree of disconnect with average people by these millionaires is almost difficult to fathom.
500K a month is 6 million a year. Lets say the taxes are 50% so you take two years to bank 6 million. It is pretty straight forward to live off six million dollars pretty much anywhere in the world. Even at 2% that is a monthly check of $10K. If you've got it in t-bills that is tax free.
But you don't get the dopamine hits from living off the interest.
I do, especially after traveling. Holy shit do we have it good here.
Is that really a problem? He makes more in one year than most people make in their entire lifetime. Unless he's out there blowing his money on mansions and yachts (which I'm pretty sure he isn't), then he could stop at any time and retire comfortably. He doesn't need to get back on the hamster wheel.
Shouldn’t be too hard with such an absurd abundance of cash.
Hopefully one day he gets off that hamster wheel and has to dig ditches or clean toilets or roof a house in the desert for a living. Then he can know what work is.
My office window shows me a variety of people who work a thousand times harder than I do coding. And each day I am grateful that I don’t have to do their tasks.
It's certainly not a millennial thing at all. 500k a month now could turn into little to nothing if he were to take a two week holiday and his fan base lost interest (conceivably).
While I'm sure starvation, lack of shelter, unemployment etc. are certainly in a different league, I can empathize with someone who feels trapped due to their compensation.
My story isn't as intense, but after an acquisition I had a really hard time. My career growth was frozen and I wanted to leave but I felt that leaving money on the table was doing a great diservice to my wife and children. It was much rougher than I had imagined.
That's not to say someone deserves pity for having to choose between a massive income and "getting off the hamster wheel", but I for one don't blame him for feeling trapped.
These real life problems of famous individuals shows that fame and success isn't always all it is cracked up to be.
Related to Ninja in particular, I would also like to point out that Ninja's success is only recent. He has been doing the streamer grind for 10 whole years to get to this point of success in his life. And with a lot of luck along the way.
Loosing 40k subs is pretty significant, however I am not sure how that is possible in just 2 days. While there is an option to auto renew most twitch subscribers are not automatic, a person is usually watching the stream and chooses to subscribe. When subscription expires they can do so again. Assuming 140k subs are evenly distributed throughout the month the loss from not streaming for 48 hours should be 2/30 * 140k, this comes down to slightly less than 10k. Moreover most of these subs should rejoin once he starts streaming again.
You can see detailed breakdown here: https://twitchstats.net/subs/ninja
Doesn't Twitch take roughly 50% of that?
If he lost 40k subscribers, that's most likely 40k renewals that didn't happen -- and they're not going to happen until he broadcasts again. It's almost a certainty he didn't lose 40k, many will have renewed once he was on again.
And if 40k subscriptions lapse over 2 days that would seem to imply that he has 600k subscribers. He doesn't. The 40k loss is just sensationalist. He didn't log in the first of the month and probably had a ton of people re-sub on the 3rd when he was back on.
That's why we have this new term, 'golden handcuffs', which has never been applied to anyone born before 1995.