How Twitch Became My Best Friend When I Was Working From Home

Like a lot of people, I struggled when I was working from home. During the first lockdown, I was stuck at home with a roommate who worked as a DJ and music producer, and his pounding beats carried upstairs into my room almost every day. I lost my normal after-work routine, which involved walking to the gym and working out pretty much every day.

Suddenly I was listening to white noise while I worked, working late and I couldn’t even stop thinking about work after I finally did log off. I like having routines, and I needed a new one to get me through WFH. I found that routine in Twitch streams.

I didn’t watch Twitch at all before lockdown. I got annoyed when streamers would pause their game to talk to people in chat or when they interrupted a cutscene to thank new subscribers. I preferred watching the edits some streamers posted on YouTube with all of the fluff taken out, or I’d just watch channels like Funhaus that made that kind of content in the first place.

But I saw another side to those kinds of Twitch interactions when I was working from home. Streamers taking the time to chat about nonsense with people in chat reminded me of working in the office, where my coworkers and I would get distracted by a 10-minute conversation about the chicest fruit or whether Shapes were a chip or a biscuit. Suddenly, I didn’t want to just be entertained by a 10-minute long, neatly edited video. I wanted to be kept company by people in chat and a streamer who loved interacting with us.

Even when I wasn’t interacting with a stream directly, I liked playing it in the background. It made me feel like there were other people in the house when I could see someone having fun playing their favourite game on my second monitor. Most days, I open Twitch when I start work and leave the sound off all day.

To keep me company, I watch gaming streamers like hexsteph and Bruce Greene, esports athletes like TenZ and cute animal streams like Marine Mammal Rescue. Watching broxh_ make incredible wood carvings inspired by Maori culture is soothing, and watching Rahul Kohli build Star Wars LEGO sets while he talks about his acting jobs makes me feel like there’s someone in the room who I’m sharing an easy silence with. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing, and I don’t even need to hear them — I just like having someone sitting next to me, even if it’s through a screen.

Sometimes I’ll watch Twitch on the weekend, but only if there’s a big event happening or I need to kill time before I go out. For me, Twitch is a part of the workday, and is just as important to my mental health as taking a lunch break or an occasional early finish.

I was very fortunate to have been able to do my job from home during a pandemic, and even more fortunate to have a safe home to work from every day — but I still struggled with my mental health. Knowing I could open Twitch every day gave me a new routine and gave me someone to talk to besides my housemate’s cat.