In these days when every morning we wake up to news that is bad or crazy or both, I think we are all looking for diversions. One of my diversions is YouTube.
I often listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast which features, among others, Linda Holmes. Every Friday the group talks about what is "making them happy" that week. Last week Linda pointed listeners to a YouTube channel called "Anti-Chef" which features an ordinary guy named Jamie who has been teaching himself to cook. Linda said that she finds it super relaxing.
And I agree! I've been watching Anti-Chef for a few years now. At first Jamie really didn't know what he was doing but he's pretty good now. And the best part is that he always shows all his mistakes. It's very relatable. Here he is making a rolled cake for 2025 Christmas but flashing back to his attempts in other years.
Anti-Chef is actually the only cooking channel that I regularly watch. (Sometimes I watch the America's Test Kitchen channel.) But I got to thinking about other YouTube channels that I watch to relax and thought that I would share them.
Reactors
One genre of YouTube Channel that I find relaxing in the evening before bed is the reaction channel where the hosts watch movies or TV shows for the first time and react to them. Because of copyright law they can't show the whole show on the channel, they can only show selected scenes. So I only watch reactions to movies and TV shows that I've already seen.
The last couple of months a lot of channels have been reacting to Robert Redford movies, for example, and I could always watch reactions to The Sting by people who have never seen it. Madison K. Thames reacts to movies on her channel and last week she reacted to The Horse Whisperer (which I hadn't seen in years, I need to rent it). I anticipate a lot of reactions to Rob Reiner movies in the coming months.
I also sometimes watch reactions in the middle of the day when I'm eating lunch. One of my favorite channels is "Watch This! With Joe and Kevin". They are two smart guys who always "get" what is going on in a scene (some reactors are not so smart). Right now they are working their way through, among other things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on Mondays) and The Gilmore Girls (on Wednesdays), so I usually watch when I'm eating lunch on those days.
Another favorite channel is Jen Murray who is working her way through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Sunday mornings.If you watch a couple of Reactor Channels Youtube will recommend more through their algorithm. On really bad days I just randomly pick one and watch it.
Big Historic Houses
For some reason I'm a sucker for videos about big historic houses. This House is a good channel for that with the added benefit that the videos are short. The subjects are usually American mansions, many of which have unfortunately been torn down.
American Countess is Julie Montagu's channel. Julie is an American, born somewhere outside Chicago. But now she's the Countess of Sandwich. On her channel she travels around to British great houses and shows them. Being a Countess gets her into a lot of houses (plus the owners want to drum up visitors because those houses are expensive to maintain). She also shares her research into her husband's great grandmother who was also an American countess (sort of like Cora in Downtown Abbey).
Being a Countess, Julie and her husband Luke (the current Earl of Sandwich) have their own great house called Mapperton. So they have their own channel called Mapperton Live on which she and Luke share all the trials and tribulations of trying to keep a great house in good repair. It makes you think twice about any dream you might have about living an aristocratic life. And it's good for a weekly escape from reality.
Miscellaneous
Sometimes I search for travel Vlogs because I like to think about being other places. There are lots of them. Tyler Braun has two channels, including one called Disneyville Podcast which is all things Disney and I've always been fond of Disney World. He is slowly moving all Disney related Vlogs over to that channel from his other channel which is just called Tyler Braun. (He owns a travel agency and travels a lot with his family but also sometimes does daily-life Vlogs where he repairs things or talks about books or the holidays.)
I also enjoy beauty blogs when I want to get really, really mindless. I look for older women but it's hard to find beauty channels that cater to older women (mature skin is 35 to these people). So I also look for makeup artists who do weddings because they work on different aged people (i.e. mothers and grandmothers of the bride). A few that I like are Angie Hot and Flashy (Angie is in her 60's), Mandy Davis MUA (she's a makeup artist who lives in Nashville), Pampered Wolf (she's in her 40's but she regularly has on her "mum" who is over 65) and Risa Does Makeup (she's a 50 year old makeup artist lving in Las Vegas). And then there's Tati, who is generally over the top (more is more!) but somehow very soothing.
I hope this gives some ideas about escaping from the daily bad news.
