Parker Schnabel has been on TV for half of his life, but there’s still some things he wants to keep private.
The Gold Rush star, 31, joined the series at 16 when he took over his grandfather’s mining business, and his journey has been documented on the show every year since. Now on its 16th season, Schnabel tells PEOPLE that he has changed his mind about how much he wants to share publicly.
“I’m probably just going to keep my personal life [private],” he explains. “I think that’s probably for the best. Just keep my personal life out of the media and the show and from talking about it too much. I think that that’s not a very good thing that I’ve done in the past, and so I’m trying to keep my personal life private.”
Schnabel further notes that being on TV makes people feel like they know him much more than they do. In reality, the long-running Discovery Channel series also only follows him for a few months while he’s working, which doesn’t offer a true depiction of who he is.
“That used to bother me quite a bit, because I did start so young, and I think that the younger you are, the more you wrap up your identity with your work,” he says. “And it is a part of, especially if you’re going to be on a TV show, it’s who you are. I also come from a family where your work is your life. And so that was ingrained in me and it’s taken me a lot to separate out that there’s me on TV and that’s a job and I’m paid to do that job and they follow me around on the mine site, but it’s not who I am.”
Over time, Schnabel has been able to let go of caring about “the assumptions” people make about him from watching a snippet of his life.
“There’s also the people who make assumptions or assume they know who I am or how I’m going to act based on watching the TV show,” he continues. “Everybody that I am good friends with have made their own assumptions about who I am and how I act and whatnot and what’s important to me based on their interactions with me, not based on watching me on TV show. So I guess a long way around saying the people I care about, they know me and they care about who I actually am, and that makes me not really care too much about what people say or how people perceive me because it just doesn’t really matter.”
During an interview with PEOPLE last year, Schnabel opened up about how his career poses a challenge in dating — especially because the job is complicated and one that many people don’t understand.
“I try to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound like Mad Max,” he laughed. “It’s hard to explain that without it sounding like some dystopian insane world. I’m in the woods and you’re living in a f—— bunker washing rocks, looking for little shiny rocks.”
“Then it makes dating incredibly difficult,” he added. “They’re like, ‘What do you do?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’”
While his life at the time revolved mainly around his career, Schnabel admitted he wants to have a family one day when the time is right.
“I do hope to have a family and a life outside of TV eventually,” he shared. “I do have a life outside of TV, but the show will end completely I think before I have kids, I would suspect.”
Gold Rush airs Fridays at 8 p.m. ET on the Discovery Channel, with the full series streaming on HBO Max.
