YouTube’s biggest solo creator PewDiePie has provided more information on why he’s taking a break from YouTube next year after numerous fake news articles from legacy media outlets said that he was quitting.
After pushing back against the fake news stories, PewDiePie said: “I feel like I have to explain why I’m taking a break now just because this [the fake news] is just gonna become weirder.”
PewDiePie added that his fans “understand that it’s normal to just take a break” but and then addressed his update to “all the boomers.”
PewDiePie said the first reason he wants to take a break is that he’s been uploading to YouTube every day for 10 years and he doesn’t want to repeat the same thing for another 10 years.
“I thought YouTube would be over by now for me. I thought I would last like two years or something like that but here I am. I don’t wanna look at myself another 10 years in the future and I’ve done the exact same thing as I’ve done now, even though I really enjoy and love what I do. I don’t wanna look back on my life 20 years later and be like, “Oh cool, so I just did YouTube videos and I never ever did anything else.” It just seems kind of sad to me.”
Next PewDiePie said he thinks it’s important for anyone to take a break, regardless of what job they do. He added that since he hasn’t taken a break before, he doesn’t know what it feels like to “not worry about uploading a video.”
“Even when I am away on, on certain things, I’m still uploading during that time,” PewDiePie said. “So I’m just still monitoring the video, I’m still making sure everything is, is good and micromanaging and I’ve never just had a full stop. So I just wanna know what that feels like.”
PewDiePie pointed to placing limits on his honeymoon as one of the factors that led to him thinking about taking a break:
“We even kept the honeymoon five days. Like even things like that as, as a minimum and that’s just kind of sad. And I think it’s gotten to the point where OK, it’s cool, I love YouTube but if I wanna keep it going, I kinda wanna change a couple of things and be able to be not so strict with it.”
PewDiePie also said that he finds the whole situation “so funny” because he originally announced the break at the end of a video because he didn’t want to overplay it, surprise his audience, or make a big deal of it but now he’s making an “announcement of the announcement” which he finds “so annoying.”
Click here to display content from YouTube.
Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy.
The spark for this “announcement of the announcement” was a previous video where PewDiePie simply said that he’s taking a break “early next year” for a “little while” and added that he’s “feeling very tired.”
Numerous fake news articles then reported that PewDiePie was quitting YouTube. PewDiePie called out some of these fake news headlines on Twitter before deleting his Twitter account shortly after.