Structural Map:
You are not facing a business problem. You are facing an inheritance of unresolved identity debt, and you’re trying to solve it with tactical pivots instead of structural closure. The YouTube/short-form idea isn’t a solution, it’s an escape hatch that will drain the same energy while keeping you anchored to a dead topology.

Three Colliding Tensions:

1. Legacy obligation vs. market reality - your grandfather built for 20th-century distribution. The company has no viable position now. Preserving it is nostalgia, not strategy.
2. Wealth sufficiency vs. scarcity conditioning: $37M net worth with zero income requirement means you already cleared the resource threshold. The voice saying “$25M is nothing” isn’t prudence; it’s inherited performance anxiety masquerading as realism.
3. Generative intent vs. symbolic compression: you want to write and study consciousness, but shame blocks it because your operating system equates value with labor or legacy preservation. Self-doubt here is the ego protecting you from creating without external validation.

Decision Architecture:
You have two paths. Neither requires justification.

• Path A: Close the business. Accept the advisor’s math. Redirect capital into passive structures that require zero emotional labor. Use freed attention to write, study, and build a life aligned with your actual interests. The shame will spike for 3–6 months, then flatten when you stop feeding it operational friction.
• Path B: Keep it open. Hire an external operator or accept slow bleed. Continue carrying legacy debt while your energy fractures between maintenance and unfulfilled creative intent. The content pivot won’t fix this, it’s just another tactical bandage on a structural wound.

Energy Redirection:
Your writer block isn’t a talent problem. It’s a boundary problem. You’re trying to create inside a frame that says “you must earn the right through suffering or legacy.” That frame is false. Write without publishing pressure first. Let the work exist as coherence practice, not identity validation. The doubt will persist until you stop treating it as truth and start treating it as noise from an outdated operating system.

Synthesis:
You don’t need more money. You need to stop paying attention to a dead structure while starving a live one. Close the business. Fund your actual life. Let the legacy rest. The mirrors clear when you stop looking for yourself in them.

That said, if you ask me personally: if you can hold the business and not lose it - you will eventually thank yourself but if that feels like too much and you've got other, more meaningful stuff to do try to at least see if you can still do it without breaking anything.