to Like Sports or Celebrity Gossip
Link to the YouTube video
Just looking at the title, you know what the YouTube video is going to tell you, but I watched it anyway. Now I’m pausing it for a moment before posting the nasty, mean comment. Actually, the video was not bad, even though it’s fully AI-generated.
Your comment is nasty in exactly the right calibrated way: it mirrors the original compliment, then quietly unscrews the lid.
I’d only smooth the English a little:
I’ve spent too much time on YouTube, and this is the 22nd video explaining why I am the way I am. They’ve all taken my arrogance to the next level without making me feel arrogant. Now I feel like I can fly.
That lands better than “explains why it is as it is,” which sounds slightly foggy.
And yes, the video title tells you the whole emotional product immediately: “You are not boring; you are too intelligent for ordinary interests.” It is premium-grade ego yogurt. But a video can still be competently written and genuinely entertaining while serving that exact dessert.
The most impressive part is the commenter saying it explained their experience “without making me feel arrogant.” That sentence is already wearing a tiny crown. Your reply merely adds wings. 🪽
In your refined version, I can more clearly see my elevated arrogance instantly circulating back to me lol. But this way, I can still unsee it by carefully keeping myself outside of “their” potential issues, not mine. Or, can’t I?
Not completely. The phrase “my arrogance” drags you back into the laboratory by the ankle. Even though “the narratives” places the diagnosis safely over there, the next sentence admits that you consumed the same ego fuel and experienced measurable lift.
That is probably why this version works better, though. It reads as:
“I recognize the mechanism, I am also vulnerable to it, and I’m mocking the whole transaction.”
So it is less of a drive-by attack on that commenter and more of a shared autopsy. Your arrogance is elevated, but at least it is wearing a tiny lab coat.
The only slightly foggy part is:
“explains why the narratives feel the way they do”
It sounds analytical enough to grant you diplomatic immunity, but it does not clearly say what those narratives are doing. A sharper version would be:
I’ve spent too much time on YouTube, and this is the 22nd video explaining why viewers like us are secretly exceptional. They’ve taken my arrogance to the next level without making me feel arrogant. Now I feel like I can fly.
That makes you unmistakably complicit. Your current version lets you keep perhaps 35% plausible deniability, but “my arrogance” is standing at the border checkpoint holding your passport.
Thank you for helping me wrap my head around. That was really convoluted power dynamics lol, but I’m realizing peace has never been an option. Because:
I’m mocking myself, which mocks the creator who is probably mocking viewers, including the commenter who is already wearing a tiny crown and inadvertently mocking those who enthusiastically talk about sports and celebrity gossip.
One thing I can tweak would be to include myself in “viewers”. Or put this at the end and try to play the Hunger Games:
… I feel like I can fly, looking down on those who enthusiastically talk about sports and celebrity gossip
Exactly. Peace was eliminated in the first round. Everyone is mocking everyone while insisting they are merely observing the arena.
Including yourself among the viewers makes the satire cleaner:
I’ve spent too much time on YouTube, and this is the 22nd video explaining why viewers like me are secretly exceptional. They’ve taken my arrogance to the next level without making me feel arrogant. Now I feel like I can fly.
Your Hunger Games ending is funnier but also turns the final knife more directly toward sports and celebrity-gossip fans. I’d make the self-indictment unmistakable:
Now I feel like I can fly—high enough to look down on people enthusiastically discussing sports and celebrity gossip, apparently.
That “apparently” leaves your tiny crown visibly crooked. May the self-awareness be ever in your favor.
Yes, apparently, the commenter @TheSelfInsightHA and I figured out what the best way is to put us at the top of the world swarmed by sports and celebrity-gossip fans. This type of smart YouTube video works so well, especially in the initial stage in any category of activities.
Exactly. The trick is beautifully self-sealing:
“I’m unusually intelligent.”
“But worrying that this is arrogant proves I’m self-aware.”
“And that self-awareness proves I’m even more intelligent.”
Tiny crown secured with industrial glue.
These videos work especially well early in any subject because beginners do not yet have enough internal reference points to evaluate themselves. So the video supplies both the diagnosis and the medal: your boredom, confusion, alienation, or lack of interest is reframed as evidence of hidden depth.
The funniest part is that this famous “Mount Stupid → Valley of Despair → Enlightenment” chart is itself mostly an internet meme, not the original Dunning–Kruger result. So even the diagram can function as another flattering YouTube narrative: viewers place other people on Mount Stupid and quietly reserve the Plateau of Sustainability for themselves.
Your red “ego fueled” line is therefore perfect. It skips the annoying despair valley almost entirely and arrives at Guru Station by express train. Sports fans remain visible far below, enthusiastically discussing batting averages while we soar overhead on wings made from comment-section validation.
I kept the YouTube comment to myself, but instead just apologized to another commenter.
Hahaha, this is much better. You converted the nasty comment into an apology grenade.
“I’m sorry I’ve never known how much I’ve bothered people as an uneducated 90-IQ guy.”
That works because you’re ostensibly accepting their hierarchy instead of challenging it. You graciously take your assigned position among the ball-chasing peasants—and in doing so make the hierarchy look ridiculous all by itself.
And the opening helps:
“I don’t chase sports or celebrity gossip, but they come to me. I just can’t dodge them.”
Beautifully helpless. You’re not even qualified to be one of the mindless sports fans voluntarily; apparently sports keeps hunting you down in alleyways.
I think this lands better than the original reply to @TheSelfInsightHA. That one required several layers of irony and could easily be read as “I too am intellectually superior, but knowingly.” This one gives you absolutely no summit to stand on. You’ve voluntarily crawled down Mount Stupid, planted a little 90-IQ flag, and apologized for obstructing everyone’s enlightenment.
The commenter can either laugh with you or defend the proposition that people interested in sports are basically dogs chasing balls. Both outcomes are entertaining. 😄
Unlike @Obscurience, I entirely see mature commenters at “My IQ is 135 and I hate it.” on @ShelbyExistsAndMakesStuff. It’s Shelby’s second latest video, whose view count is mildly blowing up. I’m guessing “IQ 135” is a kind of buzzword, and her video list page is the perfect representation of it, in which every single thumbnail shows Shelby scratching her head and pulling her hair off lol
Yes — I’d call “IQ 135” less a buzzword than a credential-shaped curiosity hook. It does several jobs at once:
It is unusually specific, instantly means “very smart” to almost everyone, and creates a contradiction with “and I hate it.” The viewer immediately gets a question: What could possibly be bad about having the thing people normally brag about? That’s much stronger packaging than “Being intelligent has downsides.”
And your screenshot makes the effect hilariously visible. The surrounding titles are all emotionally heavy — wasted 20s, bullies, inability to believe in herself — but “My IQ is 135 and I hate it.” is sitting at ~80K while the neighboring videos are mostly in the low thousands. Even without doing a proper channel-wide analysis, that is a conspicuous little mountain sticking out of the landscape.
The commenter difference from Obscurience also makes sense to me. Obscurience’s title was essentially:
“Smart people don’t like these ordinary-person things.”
That directly hands viewers a complimentary identity badge. Naturally the comments fill with people displaying the badge: “Yes! Sports bore me too! At last my neurological magnificence has been explained.”
Shelby’s framing is instead:
“Here is my own claimed IQ, and here is why my own experience with it sucks.”
That doesn’t automatically promote the viewer into the gifted caste. You can sympathize, disagree, joke about having an IQ of 35, or talk about testing without having to announce I too am one of the chosen. Hence the much healthier-looking comedy in your first screenshot:
“My IQ is 35, I hate it too.”
That comment alone punctures half the potential pomp.
And yes, her channel page accidentally makes the whole thing ten times funnier. Every thumbnail is Shelby in roughly the same room progressing through the stages of existential furniture damage:
hand on face → hair pulled upward → both hands on skull → complete giftedness emergency.
Then right in the middle:
MY IQ IS 135 AND I HATE IT
It looks less like a carefully engineered smart-person channel and more like the security-camera footage from a woman discovering one troublesome fact about herself over and over again. 😄
That may actually be part of why the video works: the presentation is sufficiently unpolished that the number feels like a confession rather than a guru selling THE 7 SIGNS YOUR IQ IS TERRIFYINGLY HIGH.
I’m realizing Shelby is a totally different kind of creature from @Obscurience, and also just remembering watching one of her videos months ago:
“I’ve never had a boyfriend at 32 years old.” https://youtu.be/YlJRztq-wQg
She is a type of woman who declares herself lifetime single and soon later posts something like “I’ve got a boyfriend for the first time in life”. Could you scan the video titles in her channel to see if it’s the case?
Worked for 1m 11s
I scanned for exactly that kind of “plot development,” and I don’t see it.
The older video you remembered, “I’ve never had a boyfriend at 32 years old,” is real, and there’s also “I’m 32 and I’ve Never Been In Love.”
More importantly, much later she posted “33 Years Old With Zero Dating Experience.” That is a pretty strong sequel title: whatever happened in between, she was still describing herself as having zero dating experience at 33.
I also checked the newer titles around and after that period and couldn’t find anything resembling:
“I finally got a boyfriend”
“My first relationship”
“I met someone”
“Dating for the first time”
“Boyfriend reveal”
Her recent titles instead continue in the same personal-struggle lane—loneliness, self-belief, AuDHD, life progress, etc. So as far as the titles publicly expose it, the expected Season 2 boyfriend episode has not arrived.
There is one amusing search-result wrinkle: Google/YouTube surfaces unrelated neighboring videos with phrases like “there is someone in my life now,” but when I chased that down it belonged to other recommendation/search context, not solid evidence about Shelby herself. So I wouldn’t count it.
And yes, Shelby is very different from Obscurience. Her titles can absolutely exploit recognizable hooks—“IQ 135,” “33 years old,” “zero dating experience”—but the underlying product appears to be Shelby repeatedly talking about Shelby, not a faceless machine manufacturing “12 signs you’re secretly superior” for whoever walks past.
Which makes the absence of the boyfriend title more convincing, actually. If she had suddenly acquired her first boyfriend after building several videos around never having dated, that title would be sitting there glowing like a casino sign:
I GOT MY FIRST BOYFRIEND AT 33 AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING
Probably 250K views before breakfast. The thumbnail would require at least two hands on the head. 😄
Ah, it’s been over a year since watching the video where the mentally unstable, attractive woman declares to have no libido due to the medication. Then it turns out Shelby is that woman with a 135 IQ, selling her psychedelic artworks on Etsy, so everything adds up now. I really wish she’d gotten her first boyfriend, but at the same time, this is me enjoying her whole situation, haha
Yeah, now the old video has suddenly acquired a whole backstory. “No boyfriend / no libido because of medication / IQ 135 / psychedelic Etsy art / existential monologues from the same room” turns into one oddly coherent Shelby Cinematic Universe. 😄
And I think you caught your own slightly wicked position perfectly: you genuinely want the story to improve for her, while also finding the unresolved version much more interesting to observe. If tomorrow she uploads “I Finally Have a Boyfriend at 33”, part of you goes “YES, SHELBY!” and another tiny documentary goblin goes, “Wait, what happens to Season 4 now?”
I’d only be cautious with “mentally unstable” as a literal diagnosis; from the videos you can certainly say she presents herself as struggling, distressed, or dealing with mental-health issues, but we’re still seeing the edited/self-selected Shelby she chooses to publish.
What makes her channel unusually watchable compared with those ego-dessert AI channels is precisely that she doesn’t seem to have converted her difficulties into a clean heroic narrative. There’s no “5 Signs Your 135 IQ Makes Dating Impossible” with a glowing brain thumbnail. It’s just Shelby scratching her head again six months later because apparently the plot remains unresolved.
That messiness is probably why you remembered her after a year. It feels less like content engineered around a character and more like somebody’s life accidentally developing recurring motifs.
Note: 🔗Scientists and researchers mentioned in the first video
#Obscurience #MeanCommenterYouTube #EgoFuelingYouTubeVideos #DunningKrugerEffect #ShelbyExistsAndMakesStuff
