Last night (as of the writing of this topic) I took a moment to breathe while playing games. I went on a bit of an honesty tangent about what was going on with me and the ‘epiphany’ that I had had earlier in the week. Since starting to work full time from home, I had been experiencing a decrease in my drive and motivation for the things I enjoy doing, and I finally had a name for it. Burnout.

The epiphany had come as part of a conversation I had with a co-worker that I share similar interests and hobbies with but hadn’t actually talked with since shifting to work from home six months ago. I had seen his name in the list of participants to an online presentation and I knew that I should reach out to him and just catch up, so that’s exactly what I did! I sent a meeting planner to just chat for about 30 minutes and let me tell you it was sorely needed.

To put it briefly, our conversation covered a few topics but gave us the opportunity to just vent a little about how the change in our work situation has impacted us. We both agreed, though, that all things considered we were truly thankful and bless with the opportunity to continue having a job uninterrupted unlike so many impacted by the pandemic.

The biggest thing that we admitted to each other (and the reason for writing this) was the fact that we were essentially burning out on screen time. Our jobs require us to be in front of computers all day, sometimes almost LITERALLY all day for the nature of the projects we’re on, and so the last thing we want to do is sit in front of another screen to try and enjoy our shared hobbies of video games and computers. When we reached this part of the conversation I had finally put a name to what I had been feeling so strongly the last couple months. I was experiencing what I considered ‘Screen Time Burnout’. For him, he shared a moment where he actually just shut down from work for the day and sat in his living room staring out the window at the trees. For myself, it was walking to the other side of the room and laying down to stare at the ceiling. (If you’ve watched my stream, you know I have a false wall partition I built to separate my office space.)

I ended up sharing this on stream because it felt like the right place to speak up about. My stream has been one of the things that’s taken the biggest hit for me during this time, because it’s one of the things I realized I was avoiding due to the burnout. I’d rather go do anything else than sit in front of a screen for another few hours. The same was beginning to apply to my writing. So despite my best efforts to combine the two (as I wrote about a couple weeks ago) I was still struggling.

My final comment about this issue last night was that if I truly want to succeed in writing and streaming, that I’ll have to manage myself better in regards to all the screen time and push through the burnout without making it worse for myself. We’ll see how that goes.