Every few months, the really annoying topic of “Is Phil actually happy?” pops up on the main thread and it’s annoying as fuck. Nothing against the people who enjoy speculating about this topic, it’s just an auto-skip for me and for many others I assume.
The biggest mistake you can make in discussing this topic is applying your own standards for happiness (which are almost purely subjective for the most part) as a baseline for how Phil sees and judges his own happiness. Guys, Phil is not a normal person. I’m not saying anything revolutionary but none of us plop our asses down in front of a webcam and literally beg for money on YT, upwards of 8 hours per day, 6 days out of the week. The level of shamelessness such an act requires is difficult to understand for any well-balanced person. Shit, this is the reason most of us are here to gawk at this nigga, shit is just unbelievable to do even once and he’s been doing it for years. In Western cultures, and especially American culture, individualism is an important trait and an aspect of this trait is to not request for help to strangers, well, pretty much ever. Phil destroys this conception and has made it his life calling to never get a normal job that’ll require him to leave his house and put himself out there.
Someone as shameless and basic as Phil has only one factor that gauges his happiness: his Tips Goal total. Anything beyond this metric is completely irrelevant and secondary. This is a man who’s shown to live day-to-day, like a fucking animal, unable to plan for his future, think beyond the obvious for one second or be responsible, constantly needing to be bailed out, constantly in a crisis, and needing strangers’ money to help him out. None of us are in such a situation and none of us could imagine what happiness would feel like unless we were all virtual panhandlers. That’s what it would take to understand Phil’s situation and actually accurately gauge what happiness within this context would actually mean.
