Arrogance and the Destruction of Self

So this year has been crazy, am I right? Aside from all of the heavy political stuff that I absolutely refuse to get into, life itself has just been a whirlwind of crazy. I love Youtube. The platform has already changed the way people view the world and has given a voice that we never knew we had. So now we can talk about how people have used such an innovative discovery to hurt people because of their arrogance and in turn, destroyed their image.

So let’s start with TanaCon. If you’ve followed the event and the aftermath, you may think I’m beating a dead horse, but hear me out. In order to scorn a multimillion-dollar event, a YouTuber, Tana Mongeau, decided to throw her own event, TanaCon, on the same weekend and down the street. Can’t make this stuff up. News YouTuber Philip DeFranco was rooting for her, along with literally thousands of her fans and the creators she invited to the event. On the outside, this was a woman who wanted to do good for creators and fans alike. Someone who wanted to break free of the corporation that YouTube has become. But in its purest form, this was a woman whose feelings were hurt and had her fans waiting in the hot sun for hours just to prove a point. In an apology video released about a month after the debacle, Tana herself admitted that the event was organized in arrogance and because of it, this 21-year-old is facing backlash worse than my next example.

FouseyTube was a channel that gained popularity years ago because of his staged “pranks”. After a couple of years of that, Yousef Erekat went silent for about two years. Just this year he came back screaming about July 15 and how he met Drake and how he was going to perform at his “Hate Dies, Love Arrives” event at the Staples Center. Everyone overflowed with skepticism, including Keemstar who did a whole documentary series on the event, which Drake did not attend and was actually canceled because of a bomb threat. Since that day, his content on his channel has primarily just been him screaming about how he’s a good person, how he’s better off on his bipolar medication, and how he’s going to open up for J. Cole on his K.O.D. tour, which is most likely not going to happen. And what really lead me to even write this article in the first place was the fact that I actually commented on one of Yousef’s videos saying it seemed arrogant and when I went to check it out again, the comments as a whole were disabled.

Let me give credit to Mongeau because she gave refunds and apologized numerous time to fans who actually had spent thousands on traveling and hotels. Whether it’s fake or not, she at least seems remorseful. Yousef is a whole different monster, one who, if left surrounded by his “yes men”, is willing to let his ego destroy him.

A little ego is good. It's a natural occurrence in everybody on planet Earth but the key to everything is balance. When you show a little ego, it's not ego, it's confidence. It's something that warrants a “you go, girl!” To show a lot is arrogance, and from there, it is a slippery slope into this self indulgence that literally no one wants to be around. Yousef, Mongeau, and anyone else can pick themselves up from this, but it requires the only thing that is able to combat the warped sense of self importance. Honesty.

The KSI Logan Paul fight is another good example, but I may wait until that actually happens.

Thanks for reading.

(Shane Dawson released a docuseries on Tanacon.)