Seems like a lot of people are down and out lately, especially moving away from Twitch - and it makes me a little sad. On the one hand I completely understand it; Twitch has kind of fostered this very unhealthy culture of number chasing, sacrificing mental and physical health for long marathon streams and hyper focusing on how many views and subs you have. I personally don't see any problem with wanting to aspire for Twitch partnership or any other form of aspirations to make money doing what you love but I agree that it isn't worth that extreme level of sacrifice. Definitely take care of yourselves, your self worth should not be determined by your view count. But also, you don't have to participate in this toxic culture. You can stream with aspirations of making some form of income from it, without having it be your only reason for streaming.

Personally, I don't know, I've been doing a lot of reflecting lately on why streaming is so attractive to me, and there's a number of answers to this question. The big boy reason has always been something along the lines of "streaming/let's play content has helped me laugh during my darkest times, I want to be somebody who can provide that entertainment for somebody else who needs that laugh", which at the risk of sounding arrogant I don't think that's a bad reason to want to grow an audience. A smaller, more day to day and definitely more self serving reason is to just create something tangible for myself to be proud of. It might be cringy or really vain but I listen back to like 80% of our own streams on a regular basis. I revisit old highlights all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if a big chunk of views on our archived videos were just from me. I find them personally entertaining. I don't think it's a bad thing to think like "even if nobody ever watches our streams again, we made a video that I'm personally proud of or can enjoy". I think, if we never make it anywhere in life, that's not a bad consolation prize. To have tangible evidence of something I helped make that I got something out of on some level. It's something I remind myself of when we have a lower view streak, and I don't think it's bad advice to suggest other streamers to do as well. If you aren't making content that you can get any enjoyment out of, then who are you making it for? Make the content you want to see, if anything else.