Since COVID, I’ve lived with a screen always within reach. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video. Each one a glowing portal to somewhere else. Somewhere easier. Somewhere quieter. When boredom crept in, I didn’t wrestle with it. I streamed it away. A show to fill the silence. A movie to dull the ache. A binge to blur the days and let time slip unnoticed.
It became second nature. The background hum of content was constant, always something queued, always a distraction waiting. And I told myself it was normal, that everyone did it. But I wasn’t consuming for joy. I wasn’t watching because I cared about the artistry of filmmaking or the craft of storytelling. I was numbing myself. Pressing play so I wouldn’t have to sit still with my own thoughts and insecurities.
When the world shut down, the days were long, unstructured, and uncertain. The streaming queue was always there. It was easier to live inside someone else’s narrative than face the ambiguity of my own. It didn’t matter what I watched, only that some sort of noise kept me company.
Recently, that cycle broke, not because I wanted it to, but because I had to. Joblessness has a way of forcing you into brutal honesty about what matters and what doesn’t. Subscriptions I once considered essential became luxuries I could no longer justify. One by one they vanished. Netflix gone. Disney+ kicked to the curb. Hulu a relic of the past. And Amazon Prime (all of it) let go. And when they were gone, I realized how much I had been leaning on them. Not for inspiration. Not for genuine enjoyment. But as escape hatches.
At first, the silence was uncomfortable. I hadn’t realized how often I reached for my phone just to fill a pause in thought, or how instinctively I opened a streaming app when I felt restless. Without the constant hum of background noise, I felt exposed. The quiet pressed in, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
But slowly, that discomfort began to shift. Without the noise, I started noticing things I hadn’t in a long time. My thoughts became clear. My patterns and habits noticeable. Sparks of curiosity and creatively became more frequent. What surprised me most wasn’t the loss of new content. It was what resurfaced from the past.
Several months ago, out of nowhere, Burnie Burns revived Rooster Teeth. The website returned, the community spaces reopened, and the deep archive of content was made available again. Out of curiosity, I pressed play on the RT Podcast again, after years away.
And suddenly, I was back in familiar territory. Burnie, Gus, Gavin, Barb—their voices filled my headphones, the same blend of chaos and banter that had carried me through so many phases of my life. I expected nostalgia, maybe even a little bittersweetness. What I didn’t expect was the deep sense of perspective it gave me.
For more than a decade, Rooster Teeth had been a part of my life. From my senior year of high school through college and into my early jobs, it was a constant presence. Their podcasts, shows, and community gave me a place to laugh, to belong, and sometimes even to escape. I loved it so much that from 2017 to 2019, I volunteered as a Guardian at RTX, their convention in Austin. It wasn’t just entertainment; it was a second home online.
But like so many things, my connection faded with time. By 2020, I had drifted away. COVID forced my attention toward grad school and survival. The company itself was going through changes that made it feel different, less like the community I had grown up with. When Rooster Teeth shut down in 2024, I felt the pang of an ending, but it seemed inevitable.
Listening to the RT podcast again wasn’t about trying to live in the past. It was about recognizing how much I had changed since I first heard those voices. Their jokes and tangents reminded me of who I was at seventeen, or twenty-three, or twenty-seven. I remembered the stress of late-night study sessions, the excitement of graduating, the fear and thrill of moving cross-country for work. Back then, their content was my lifeline.
Now, I could hear it with different ears, as someone who had grown, stumbled, and changed in ways I never could have predicted.
That’s the strange gift of revisiting old loves: they don’t stay the same, and neither do we. Walking back into them is like stepping into a room from your childhood home. The walls, the light, and the chipped paint. But you notice details you never saw before. You stand in the same place, but you realize you’re no longer the same person who stood there years ago.
And maybe that’s the real lesson. Change is not something to fear. It’s necessary. We’re not meant to cling forever to the things that once defined us. But sometimes revisiting them shows us just how far we’ve come. Rooster Teeth isn’t the centerpiece of my life anymore. And that’s okay. What it gives me now is different; it’s a reminder that growth doesn’t erase the past. It builds on it.
Cutting out endless streaming cleared the space for me to see this. I don’t need constant distractions to move forward. What I need is perspective. A reminder that life is motion, and that I’ve already lived through so many versions of myself. Revisiting the past isn’t about getting stuck there; it’s about realizing that growth is possible, that change is inevitable, and that both can be good.
I don’t know exactly what the next version of me looks like. But I know there will be one. And when I get there, maybe I’ll look back at today the way I looked back at Rooster Teeth: with gratitude, perspective, and the understanding that change, however uncomfortable, is always worth it.
I freed myself of a cycle to grow. Now, I write more than I ever did before. What is the next decade going to look like as I continue to discover new paths?
Jesús M. Rivera 