Thinking About Getting Into: StudyTube

By the time I had discovered Studyblrs, and then consequently, StudyTube, it was already too late. I was out of college and had been for two years when I happened upon the digital communities devoted to perfectly organized class notes, hours-long study-with-me videos, and the aesthetic that stated loudly "I have spent many years of my life loitering in suburban Barnes and Nobles, and the most common birthday gift I have received over the years is an empty notebook." If only I had found them earlier.

For most of my life, I had always cared deeply about school, even if my 10-year-old Facebook statuses I see in my memories show me a near constant bemoaning about homework and studying. I would make a point to read the Dictionary.com word of the day. I would go to library book sales and fill a brown paper bag till it nearly burst, filled with classics—a few of which I read, most of which I did not. I grew so obsessed with getting into college—and so secretly competitive with my classmates—that friends called me Paris. Geller, that is.

I fell back into the world of StudyTubers (you guessed it: YouTubers who make videos about studying) after I learned about a popular Gen-Z aesthetic over the summer: Dark Academia. The gist of it is very Secret History—a bit of Classics, many blazers, and lots and lots of libraries. A splash of Clair de Lune, Gymnopédie No. 1, Philip Glass's original soundtrack for The Hours. This aesthetic is not new, of course. Anyone on Tumblr in the early 2010s could tell you that. My own old Tumblr, full of photos of bookshelves and "deep" literary quotes—all of which I reblogged when, yes, I could have been using that time to actually read more books—could tell you that. The idea of studying is often more appealing than actually studying.

That's the train of thought that led me to remember one StudyTuber in particular, who I had interviewed a little over two years ago: a young British girl who goes by the moniker of Ruby Granger.

When I spoke to her back then, she had just been finishing up her secondary education. I had seen from her channel that months before, she had been rejected from Oxford—the university that she dreamed of attending for so long, so intensely, that she had incorporated imagery of the school into every one of her videos. She had vlogged through her entire application process, her visits to the school, her interviews. She had let her hundreds of thousands of followers (now nearly half a million) in on her journey—and then she didn't get in.

Watching Ruby's video about her rejection was particularly painful; when I applied to colleges, I only told one close friend and my guidance counselor where I was even applying, both for fear of competition and for fear that if I didn't get in, I'd have to contend with telling others. The prospect of having to reveal such a thing—something that I viewed with such shame—was too much for me to handle. I couldn't take what I thought might be a form of public humiliation.

But Ruby admit her rejection on her highly public platform, and months later she told me that the messages she received from viewers who felt a comfort and solidarity with her experience made her feel incredibly supported. When I decided to search her name again a few weeks ago, I discovered that she's still making videos. She's an English student at the University of Exeter. And ten months ago—about two years after her Oxford rejection—she uploaded another video, explaining how she finally achieved closure with it all. The shift in her perspective is heartening, inspiring even—and it might be why I find myself drawn to StudyTube once more.

Very shortly after I graduated college, I felt a pang of regret. I could have appreciated it more. I could have taken more classes, involved myself more academically. Yes, I had relatively high goals for my grades and yes, I took classes that I was interested in—including an advanced Classics course my very first semester that my Tumblr days likely inspired me to jump into and a good five or six classes specifically in Renaissance literature that I elected to do...for fun. But I saw college as a launch pad, and I had for some time. It seemed like the path I had to follow to become capital-S successful was relatively straight and narrow, and I was privileged to see it as such.

So I worked hard in my classes, but I cared more about my off-campus internships. I worked my on-campus job in the library a few times a week, and instead of using my spare moments behind the check-out desk to squeeze in class readings or push myself further academically, more often than not, I scrolled through women's media sites. When I finally got some paid writing jobs (at least one of which paid even less than my campus job) I prioritized my copy over my readings. I skipped more than one class to go to a red carpet, where I would flounder to ask a celebrity a question or two with my heart beating in my chest, just hoping that I wouldn't disappoint my editor.

Except the path was not straight and narrow, and my career has shown me that something that school, relatively speaking, could not. That no amount of preparation or diligence guarantees success. Media layoffs—those I've observed and those I've experienced—have taught me this: You can be really good and work really hard, and still fall short.

StudyTube—while, of course flawed just like any other mode of entertainment, overly reliant on consumeristic tendencies, unrealistic about the inequalities within academia, and so on—can, in the span of one 10-minute study-with-me, or a video about note-taking advice, or a vlog on a normal school day, exist, if temporarily, in a vacuum. For someone who was raised Catholic (and currently practices no religion), I will admit that my core values are embarrassingly Calvinist—and that's on my internalized capitalism. And so the simple, if adolescent-skewing message that hard work makes way for success is one that feels like a balm to me.

Because we know this not to be true—just look at any news story positioned as "inspiring" about a person working insane overtime to pay off a relative's medical bills, or a student taking on several jobs amid their classes just to afford their education. Hard work can mean there's dinner on the table. It can sometimes translate into a nice vacation. But what is guaranteed—in a capitalist society where worker's rights are not prioritized and social safety nets don't even include universal healthcare—is nothing. It's a myth we've been selling ourselves for centuries.

Of course I wish it were different. And if it were, I wonder if I would have spent so many hours in my teenage years sitting in the AP and SAT prep book section of my local Barnes and Noble, as if the knowledge those books contained might be transmitted to my mind through osmosis. If I might have been less panicked about securing my college acceptance. If I might have spent more time learning and studying simply because I liked to do it, because it makes me feel good, because it is engaging and satisfying, and not because I had been instilled the belief that because I had failed one biology test my freshman year of high school, that I was just bad at science and needed to work extra hard to make up for that.

I don't know what Ruby Granger wants to do with her life. It's a question I've wondered on occasion, but one that I'm not sure I want answered. There is a particular joy in watching someone attend to their task with their mind fully in the present. She and the other StudyTubers I've watched do their school work with a particular kind of diligence—one that seems, from the outside, devoid of the faint undercurrent of dread I have pretty much always felt. In high school health class, the teacher made us go around the room and share our biggest fear. I blurted out "failure" before I realized how ridiculous it sounded to be more terrorized by a lack of whatever you might consider "success" than like...death.

At the same time, I recognize that on a very real level, StudyTube does have the makings of productivity porn. And while I've disavowed myself from hustle culture, I can't say for certain whether I'm watching videos on bullet journals and class notes because they feel comforting, or because on some level, they feel like an acceptable form of entertainment when I'm especially down myself for not using my time in a productive manner. I often feel guilty for watching TV without multitasking. Sometimes I have to put a video game down after 10 minutes because it doesn't sit with me right, knowing I could be using my time instead to read a book or go on Duolingo. StudyTube is often a compromise: A treat that does, in a convoluted sense, still feel like the best parts of work.

I know I need to untether my mind further from the Protestant work ethic; I've recognized this from years of processing academic and professional failures (or even simple shortcomings) as negative testaments to my character. Logically, I know these facets of myself are not intertwined. Yet I have to consciously push for the separation of matter and mind.

So when I want to be kind to myself—give myself a small break, maybe after finishing a task or as an enticement before beginning another—I'll give myself 10 minutes and go on StudyTube. I might watch someone walk through their favorite highlighters or chat about the six books they finished in a week or simply share their favorite snacks to eat while they're studying. In that brief span of time, I'll start to feel a little less static. I might feel the resolve to get some reading done, or to make some use of that Babbel subscription I impulse-bought, or just to write in my journal. I'll remind myself again—buying into the fantasy I need to have in order to operate in our current world—that if I work really hard, maybe I'll feel something like joy.