This article was published on April 26, 2019

What your favorite YouTubers did before they got famous, according to that viral Twitter meme


What your favorite YouTubers did before they got famous, according to that viral Twitter meme

One of Twitter’s latest memes has people spilling about their previous work experience, YouTubers included. Now we’re able to see what they did before they started making videos for entertainment — and several of them have apparently started in boring jobs.

The “5 Jobs I’ve had” meme appears to have started with one user who tagged a few friends, and proceeded to spread. Soon everyone was listing their work history, (including your author), so much so that Twitter started to look like a cut-rate LinkedIn. Some listed their jobs in an unusual or joking fashion, some gave the reason the job ended, while others simply listed the bizarre truth and allowed it to speak for itself (again, your author included).

As expected, several YouTubers jumped on the meme, giving us a glimpse into what kinds of lives video stars lead before they attempt to make a go of it on Google’s cut-throat, algorithm-driven wasteland. What would drive someone to attempt to make (or supplement) their living in this hellscape? We’ve looked at that data (from about 240 YouTubers) and determined what the most common pre-YouTube job among them was, alongside a few runners-up. We included users who included “YouTuber” in their list in one form or another.

The most common pre-YouTuber job is “salesperson/associate/etc” a generic title for lots of retail positions, and the jobs only get more prosaic the further down the list you go — cashier, dishwasher, janitor, waiter, and the like. Other positions include teacher, bartender, lifeguard, and babysitter.

No shade here — collecting a paycheck is a privilege not everyone has.

Still, the difference between the personality-driven content like that required to stand out on YouTube and the humdrum jobs many ‘Tubers have had shows one thing: life takes us all on weird paths.

Take at least some of these tweets with a grain of salt: several had a bit of a jokey feel to them. For most of them, we just have to take it on faith they’re telling us the truth.

For those who appear serious, the trend of “boring” jobs as a prelude to doing YouTube is a nice reminder that the job you start on may not be the one you wind up with later in life.

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