Deal With Developer Burnout
A Game Dev’s (Thor’s) Life Advice
Advice on how to find help and deal burnout as a developer.
Therapy/Have a Chat
When you’re feeling down and can’t figure out why, try sitting down and having a conversation with yourself to determine the reason. Do it without distractions — turn off the internet, don’t play video games, and avoid scrolling through TikTok. Just turn everything off and talk to yourself.
If you still can’t figure it out, you find yourself in a doom spiral, feeling bad, thinking what you’re doing is bad, feeling like you’re not progressing, and believing everything is bad, and it drives you to get worse and worse until there’s nothing left, go talk to somebody. There’s no harm in talking to someone, especially a professional, about how you feel. You might need help. And to anyone who thinks that’s lame or unmanly, I don’t care. That’s a stupid attitude. If you’re not talking to people about your internal struggles, you are not getting help.
Get Out There
Use your time on earth to spend that time with other people. Have experiences. Go on adventures. Do things. Don’t spend your time doom scrolling TikTok. It’s not worth it. There’s a lot more out there. There is a whole universe of shit, man.
Keep Learning
You could go on to YouTube right now and learn any goddamn thing you want to. There’s a video for that. There’s a tutorial for that. You have access to all of it. You can learn anything you want to. Anything.
This idea of you are too old to learn is insane to me. You can learn anything. So learn some shit. And stop worrying about, oh man, is it too late for me? No. No. Stop putting invisible barriers in front of yourself as an excuse for not just sitting there and learning some new shit. Don’t give yourself an excuse. Just go do it.
Lost Time
I’m stuck in burnout, have professional help for that though. Finding you gave me the motivation to start learning coding but due to the constant brain fog and low energy I’m not really able to learn completely new stuff.
Everyone learns something at their own pace. When I was recovering from COVID it took me about two and a half years fully to recover from it. I had long COVID and I almost died and as I was recovering from that I basically couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t program, I couldn’t do art, I couldn’t write, I would forget words all the time. It was deeply frustrating, so I understand what you’re going through. Very keenly aware of that. And I had to relearn those things. And it felt like a step back. It felt like I lost a lot of time. But, now I can do all the things that I used to do before, and more. It just takes time.
It takes time for you to overcome the things you need to, in the way you need to. There are some things that I used to be able to do that I just don’t do anymore. There’s some things I can do better now. Adapt. You will be a different person tomorrow than you are today, and that is okay. Don’t ever feel like you’re missing out.
