My chest hurts and I feel like I’m going to pass out. But I’m actually still putting work off doing so.

Ouch.

Today, I worked about 13 hours in total. Well, it was actually at the end of last week. And I did it twice.

But throughout the past week and a half, I’ve still been doing pretty consistent work as well. I would say maybe a good 4–8 hours of productive work.

What is interesting is that firstly, I did this of my own volition. And secondly, before this very productive week, I had been doing virtually nothing.

I graduated from college in Spring 2022 with of Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. And I have been unable to find a job in my field since then.

Needless to say, it has been extremely demotivating. I’ve had my moments of self-loathing, and a lack of purpose or motivation. And so I’ve found it very difficult to do much over these many months.

I still got some stuff done, but nowhere near what one would consider full-time hours. But some things have changed recently.

What Changed

Don’t misunderstand, this isn’t one of those feel-good comeback stories. You know, those ones that are like…

Last Year I Was Jobless. Now I’m Making $250,000/Yr Working For Applamgooglsoft.

That’s still a work in progress for me, unfortunately. I’d be glad for even 10% of that income right now.

However, a number of things did change for me that caused me to regain some semblance of meaning and purpose in my life.

The first thing is, I started volunteering as a software engineer. I was super nervous about having to interview for it, but it turned out to be a piece of cake.

All I had to do was answer what I had done in the past, and if I would be able to put in a couple of hours a week to work on frontend issues on their website.

And I was in. If only it were that easy when finding a real job.

Technically, I’m only expected to put in maybe 8–10 hours a week at most. Not even required, just expected.

Yet, I’ve been doing a lot more than that. Even despite the fact that I’m not getting paid to do it, I’ve still done a bunch of days that have basically been full-time shifts or longer.

I woke up on that eventful Thursday at around 8:30–9:00 AM. And I worked until around 9:30–10:00 PM.

I did maybe have a 20-minute lunch break and another 15 minutes of bathroom time. But other than that, it was nothing but code and more code.

The next day on Friday, I woke up around the same time. Didn’t quite get as much coding done, and ended “only” around 4:00 PM. But I still spent the rest of that day working.

You see, there was another thing that changed, no more than two weeks ago from the time of writing this. I started writing articles on Medium.

I’m not going to lie, I had no idea Medium was open for anyone to write articles. Or even a social media platform. I thought it was just some news publication.

I had considered blogging as a hobby, but I didn’t want to have to manage my own site and pay for the hosting to do so. I also never bothered to research anything about it.

And so, I was chatting with ChatGPT about this when it told me I could actually blog on Medium for free.

It’s pretty crazy how quickly conversing with AI has become normal for me.

So far, I’m liking Medium a lot. The content here can be very personally touching and is presented professionally. I also like the simple, standardized look of everything.

After that extended period of coding work, I spent another 3–4 hours writing another article.

As I mentioned, those were the busiest days. The other days throughout the week weren’t as crazy, but I still spent a good 4–8 hours split between coding and articles.

Even today, I’ve worked a good 6 hours, and with writing this article, there’ll probably be another 3–4 hours or so.

I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty burnt out. I’ve got bad chest pains and I feel totally fatigued.

I slept a full 2-3 hours earlier than usual yesterday at 9:30 PM. Even at 5:00 in the evening, I felt like I was struggling to stay alive, let alone remain awake.

Then because of that change in sleeping time, I woke up at 5:30 in the morning. Also three hours earlier than usual.

I was still tired. But I checked Medium and my stock portfolio for a bit.

Then fell back asleep at 7:00 AM.

Then I woke up another 3 hours later.

And even then, I was still tired. I shouldn’t even be writing now, but I’m doing it anyways. Doing things is making me feel alive again.

But despite all of that, the truth is I’m actually still procrastinating. There’s something I’ve been putting off.

And no, it’s not going to be something cliche like, “I’ve been putting off my own well-being.”

Working To Avoid Work

You see, I have another hobby project I’ve been working on for quite some time. I’ve been at it for over a year now, for that matter.

It’s right in my profile description.

“I’m also working toward improving in many areas of gamedev.”

I’ve been working on the second major project I’ve ever worked on in my life. And it’s been going much better than the first one.

I’ve gotten a lot done in the past year, albeit not as much as I probably could have. Though to be fair, there’s always more than could’ve been done in hindsight.

The thing is, I haven’t really worked much on the project at all during this time. Even as far back as August 2022, things have been moving at a pretty glacial pace in terms of progress.

I wouldn’t say it was because of a lack of effort put into it. I did put many hours here and there trying to work on the initial scene of the game, and countless hours in bed thinking about it.

But if I were to be completely real, it is mostly because I am refusing to put my head in the game (literally) and just work on it. So many days have passed without me even opening the project.

You see, it’s not like I had no choice. I made the conscious decision to work on other things besides the project. The volunteer position only expected 8–10 hours a week, but I put in more than double that.

Similarly, no one is forcing me to write this article right now instead of working on my game. I’m making the conscious decision to do so right now.

Sure, I can’t deny that I’m happy that I’m getting some form of work done. It’s much better than the months I spent doing virtually nothing else during my fruitless job search that’s now approaching the year-long mark.

But because I’ve spent so much work on this article and coding for the organization, I’ve simply got no time or energy left for game dev.

If I were rational, I would cut down the hours on these other endeavors to focus on what I want to make more progress in.

But I probably won’t. Because there are other problems in play here.

Game Dev Is Harder

I’m not going to say that programming the website or writing articles is easy. There’s a reason why it takes full work days, or at least many hours to get those tasks done.

But out of the three activities mentioned, they are certainly the most straightforward to work with. When writing articles, I basically just word-vomit whatever I’m thinking right onto the page.

It’s relatively simple to write these articles once I get going because I’m talking from my own personal experiences.

Just let the stream flow… we’re talking about words, by the way.

After that, I do minimal editing to see if I made any grammatical mistakes missed by Grammarly. Then I think a bit about whether there are any points I’ve missed that would be good to add in.

I schedule it, I let it sit for a few days, and I come back to it a little before it’s posted. If I don’t hate myself or cringe massively, I let it go public.

Similarly, in programming, many problems have already been solved. I can break down the problems into smaller parts, and write code to solve those.

Make them all work together with each other, and I’ve got the solution to the larger problem.

Even the things I don’t know, I can Google search. Or more accurately nowadays, I consult ChatGPT for information or basic code outlines, and I build upon and modify portions to address the requirements of the issues.

And with both writing and coding, the progress I make can be quite visible.

Each word I am slapping onto this page (or I guess, screen), is adding more and more to the size of the article. And within a relatively short period of time, I can see it fully formed.

Small changes to code can create a big difference. Sure, there are many scenarios where you can change a lot and seem like you’re not making progress.

But you know you’re changing logic and variables and stuff, and eventually, you fix that one critical bug and the entire program just comes to life.

It’s alive!!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA

However, with the type of game I am developing, there is so much that is unknown to me. There aren’t predetermined solutions or topics to follow. And that makes it much more difficult for me.

If I were asked to fix this bug in a loop, I would be able to give a quick answer. It’s this line here, it’s not adding the variables correctly or whatever.

Tell me to recall a story from my childhood and put it into writing, and it’s the same thing. I already know my own childhood.

Now, if you were to ask me to tell you an engaging story and create an action-packed movie out of it, well… I don’t really have an easy answer for that.

I would start to sweat thinking about all the different ways I could do it.

Slice-of-life, or more drama?

How would I word everything, is the pacing okay?

Whose definitions or standards are we using anyways?

It’s essentially paralysis by analysis. There are so many different ways I can do it, each with its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

Do I make her punch a customer in the face or leg-sweep them?

When progress does happen, it just goes so slowly. I have certainly put some sessions in the last month into trying and progressing.

While I have inched the project forward, it is rather disappointing to describe what I’ve gotten done in recent times.

All the easy work had been done already, leaving me with no choice but to face the tough stuff.

Let’s take a look at the last session I worked on it, a little before I started my extended session of workaholicism.

I spent maybe two to three hours trying to build the final version of the introductory scene of the game.

Do you know how much progress I made?

I wrote three whole sentences, and I made artwork of a car slide to move in front of the player’s point of view.

To put that in perspective, I’d probably have to do at least a dozen more of those to finish the scene. And do you know how many scenes I’m expecting there to be in the full story? At least sixty.

So even at a pace of one scene per week, I would still miss the deadline I set for myself, which is February 2024.

It can certainly be hard to see the finish line when it’s so far away. Yeah, I know things will likely pick up once I get past the beginning.

But it’s just difficult to not feel stuck when it’s so challenging to come up with methods to progress even a little bit.

I’ve experienced this same feeling many times before, particularly in college.

There were at least one or two assignments I remember that I just had no idea how to complete. I would spend countless hours researching and looking at the class forums, only to get nowhere.

Eventually, I would just give up and go do something else. Perhaps given a little bit of time away, I would be able to think clearer.

Yeah… nope. This ain’t happening.

I would come back the next day, and do the same thing. Occasionally, I would find a little nugget of information that would help a little bit.

But for the most part, I was floundering around, trying everything to just get something working. And failing to do so.

The time between attempts would get longer. Eventually, I would just give in and accept I would probably be getting a 40% on this assignment.

Over a week would pass without me even touching it. Then maybe two days before the due date, I would give it one more shot.

Some I was able to work out. But for most of the others, it changed nothing.

It Wasn’t Just Procrastination or Laziness

Looking back on these experiences made me realize something.

I procrastinated not necessarily because I was lazy, but because there was something wrong.

With those assignments, I didn’t procrastinate simply because I didn’t want to work on them. It’s just that I had reached a brick wall, and I had no idea where to go from there.

When I spent these past months doing nothing but moping around, watching YouTube, and consuming mindless media online, it wasn’t necessarily because of pure laziness.

It’s because I had lost any sense of meaning or purpose. And if there was no purpose in living, there was no purpose in doing anything at all.

The same goes for my game project right now. I want to finish it.

But there was, and possibly still is something still wrong that’s preventing me from doing so.

I had no idea what the scenes would look like because none of the artwork was done at the time. And I’m still struggling to figure out how the background music should sound to fit in with those scenes.

My mindset of having to have everything perfect right off the bat was preventing me from making any progress at all. And so I would put it off.

Even with all the motivation in the world, there was simply no way I could overcome something I wasn’t even conscious was affecting me.

I could bash my head against the wall for months, screaming at myself to make the pretty pictures and words. And I still wouldn’t get anywhere.

In order to do so, I needed to address the real underlying issues. Whether that was confidence, motivation, or simply just not being sure where to go.

I could figure things out from there, and only then could real progress be made.

Conclusion

As of this moment, I don’t really have an excuse anymore.

The art’s all done. All I need to do is continue to revise the writing and slowly piece it together over the next year.

I am definitely going to finish what I’ve started. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.

But maybe later.