It’s been two years. Chamberlain now has 8 million YouTube followers. She brought in the editing tricks that first set her friends and family rolling on the floor, but now they take longer to perfect.

Chamberlain edits each video she makes for between 20 and 30 hours, often at stretches of 10 or 15 hours at a time. Her goal is to be funny, to keep people watching. It’s as if the comic value of each video is inversely proportional to how little humor she experiences while making it. During her marathon editing sessions, she said, she laughs for “maybe, maybe 10 seconds max.”

“It’s almost like when you’re doing your homework, you’re halfway through a math work sheet, you’re really in it right there. You can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything,” she said. “Or if you’re watching a movie and you’re so zoned in you don’t even remember what real life is. You just think you’re in the movie. That’s exactly how it is, but times five. I’m so zoned in. I have this weird mind-set where it’s me quickly analyzing every five seconds, ‘Is this boring, is this stupid, can I cut this? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.’”

Like other professional social media users, the work has taken a physical toll on her. (She releases roughly one video a week.) She used to edit at a desktop, but she developed back pain. Now she works from her bed. She keeps blue mood lighting on, but her vision has deteriorated. She wears reading glasses “like I’m 85 years old, because my eyes do actually get really strained.”

She’s training herself for long-distance editing. “I’ve actually gotten to a point now where I feel like I’m really, really mentally strong and I don’t really lose my marbles as often,” she said.

In May of 2020, she will turn 19.

****