GEOFF HUTCHISON became determined not to turn into a. grump old bugger upon retirement from a career in journalism. So he wondered: what is it about ageing that tends to have this effect on Australian men, and what can be done to arrest that development.
Consulting a wide range of experts and mining his own experience and that of the other men in his life, Geoff has discovered how we can all live a happier, healthier and less grumpy life.
Read on for an extract from How Not to Become a Grumpy Old Bugger.
Chapter 5
Influencer Interlude
I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to check in on you. See how you’re feeling. I’m curious to ask if the many thousands of words preceding these ones have indeed given you pause for thought. Have you been able to consider life with the prospect of a little less grump in it? And what it would feel like to relax those shoulders, just a bit?
Give it a try.
Maybe this morning you chose to ignore Mrs Drobny’s Lhasa Apso and its anxious barking because you realised the poor little bugger just gets lonely when she goes to work. And as you sat behind another Camry driver who obviously didn’t know where he was going, your instinct today was to back off the horn and give him a moment to get his bearings.
Isn’t it a bit of a relief to know we don’t always have to impose ourselves? Or have the last word?
~
Why don’t we do a little grumpy reflex test? To see where we’re at.
Instead of tapping your patella lightly with a hammer and observing how dramatically your lower leg bounces, how about I tap you on the bonce with the story of a YouTube sensation who, it seems to me, rather typifies the nature of fame in the early part of the 21st century. And perhaps, for some of you, the superficiality of the modern human experience.
How will you respond to him, I wonder. Will you recognise his talents as unusual or extraordinary? When you hear of the success he has enjoyed, will you acknowledge as remarkable his ability to monetise those talents? Or will you want to pull your eyes out? Or have him devoured by sharks?
Whatever your response, the fleeting nature of short-attention-span fame these days surely means that within a few months he may be forgotten. Supplanted by a cat that can play the banjo.
Ready?
So, back in 2017, a rather pasty-faced nineteen-year-old named Jimmy Donaldson, who calls himself MrBeast, made a YouTube video where he declared his intention to count to 100,000 nonstop on camera.
I know, you’re shaking your head already. And don’t ask me why he doesn’t have a space in his name or why he considers himself a beast.
It’s easy to find. I hit play.
‘Screw it,’ says MrBeast and then he starts: ‘One, two, three, four …’
This task, incredibly dreary as it is, will require great endurance. It will take nearly forty hours to complete. MrBeast will not leave his chair. I presume he wees into a bottle.
I’m interested enough to click ahead many hours.
‘… 62,373, 62,374, 62,375 …’
At this point, MrBeast is slurring his numbers, yawning and rubbing his right eye. The effort to keep his concentration must be exhausting; so too the nonstop naming of numbers, which are becoming an ever-bigger mouthful.
I head towards the end of this epic.
‘… 97,233, 97,234, 97,235 …’
As he gets closer to his target, he closes his eyes, rocks back and forward in his chair.
‘… 99,999, 100,000!’
MrBeast leans back and reflects on it all. He concludes with, ‘What am I doing with my life?’
He will later say he did it because he was bored.
Let’s pause. What do you think of him so far?
Are you curious? Or is he an idiot?
Am I wasting your time even asking you to have an opinion of him? Would you prefer to watch someone explaining the engineering requirements of building a box girder bridge? Because that is real. That has purpose.
Well, let me tell you what came next.
In the seven years since young MrBeast made what appeared to be an amusingly gimmicky but essentially pointless video, it has been watched more than twenty-nine million times. And MrBeast has become a phenomenon. His YouTube channel is the most subscribed individual channel on the platform, with more than 233 million subscribers. He now has an estimated net worth of US$500 million. In 2023, Time magazine named him one of the world’s Top 100 most influential people.
In what way does he influence?
Today MrBeast owns a fast-growing burger chain in the United States.
He sells chocolate bars and a seemingly endless range of merchandise. His videos and competitions, often with big money giveaways, draw huge online audiences. A couple of years ago, he recreated the Squid Game television series as a real-life event.
He has been suitably philanthropic. He spends money planting trees and removing plastic from the oceans and feeding the hungry kids of Africa.
And he’s still keen on the weird stunt, including being buried alive in a coffin for 50 hours.
It’s hard for me to get beyond thinking MrBeast is just a weird product of a weird world. An entertainment offering of his time, the way Harry Houdini or PT Barnum were in theirs. But he also understands keenly the phenomenon that is mass communication these days and how to engage and build a huge audience.
And he’s still keen on the weird stunt, including being buried alive in a coffin for 50 hours.
He once filmed himself giving a homeless man $10,000, and in response the money from ad revenue began to pour in. He told Forbes magazine, ‘I don’t want to play it up too much. It just felt good. It’s a world where I take ten grand and light it on fire and make twenty grand.’
If that isn’t a capitalist American wet dream, I don’t know what is.
What’s next? MrBeast doesn’t rule out running for US president one day.
What do you think of him now?
~
Personally, I find it very hard to relate to anything he does, but that is probably generational. I wasn’t brought up watching YouTube videos. And despite being a participant in the media for most of my life, I am suspicious of his motives and the public benefit. There is never enough public benefit.
But if you have kids or grandkids, there’s a pretty good chance they know who MrBeast is. And for me, that’s reason enough to be moderately engaged and at least familiar with his story. It’s a bit like my mum and dad coming into the lounge room on a Sunday night to watch a few minutes of Countdown. They usually left saying ‘What a bloody racket!’ but later they might hum along when they heard the song again.
It’s about engagement. Knowing what’s going on with the kids.
As we get older, it is very easy to rely only on the familiar, the comforting, the certain. But I reckon a fascination with all things nostalgic, while wistful and fun sometimes, can also be a sign that we don’t want to engage with the new. Those rose-coloured memories do nothing to encourage us to believe in the future.
Did the roast chook for the Sunday lunches of your youth really taste better than the roast chook of today? I don’t think so. But it was a rare treat, so our anticipation was greater. And the memory invites us to return to our younger selves. That’s why footy was better back then, and we could leave our front doors unlocked, and there was a real sense of community …
You might insert etc., etc., etc. here, but I’m inclined to add blah, blah, blah.
We do need to keep stretching. We need to retain a sense of wonder about things we don’t already know. Particularly when our grandkids want to talk to us about that man who counted to 100,000 ‘without stopping!’
I’ll probably watch MrBeast’s career progression with some interest, particularly if I am still alive to see him run for the presidency in 2044.
And to be honest, having made up that line about a cat playing a banjo, I’ll probably go and check out whether such a thing really exists.
Stay curious. Even about those things you don’t really care about.
~
(And I’ve just wasted thirty seconds of my life watching a 1978 Little Friskies cat-food ad from the United States that indeed features cats appearing to play banjos. But not very well.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In 2022, Geoff Hutchison hung up his headphones after a long career as an ABC broadcaster. Before that, he was a journalist on the 7.30 Report and a one-time Foreign Correspondent. Geoff is intensely curious and has seldom worked a day in his life. It has been one of great privilege: talking to people, witnessing extraordinary moments and coming to the understanding that the things we share are far more significant than those that divide us.
0 Comments