A full year
In a few days it'll be September 6th, my birthday. I'll be hitting 36, and also it'll be another birthday I celebrate jobless.
So this post I wanted to try and do a retrospective on how the past year has gone so I can get out my remaining thoughts and celebrate being an Old without it weighing me down. There isn't going to be much of a particular structure here.
Jobs
It's not surprising, but it still remains frustrating how terrible the job market is right now. I posted a rant a few months ago during one of my low periods that went surprisingly viral, and unfortunately not much has changed since then. I've had another four or so interviews since then, some of which somehow went to the recruiter screen and then stopped there. It's particularly fucked how often I've had recruiters tell me that I'm going to the next steps only to ghost me or send me an email two weeks later saying they're going with someone else. It starts to feel like they're lying right to my face.
During the first few months of being laid off I slow rolled the job search because I was suffering from pretty heavy burnout. Even now it still feels like I'm a candle that's running out of wax, but at some point I think this perpetual exhaustion might just be something else. It's hard to say.
Hobbies
Desperate to not become a total shut-in, particularly because I think it would drive me insane, I rekindled my love of Magic the Gathering. Maybe not the most practical of hobbies to have when you're unemployed, but having a weekly community of people that I actually talk to and play games with does wonders even for my introverted ass.
I also have the poor tendency to just...disconnect from everyone else. My apologies, to my friends reading this. But picking up multiplayer games again has also been helpful in keeping me just active. The time spent playing Big Walk with a core group of friends is something that I deeply cherished.
As you're reading this blog right now, I also started up writing earlier this year. I'm terrible at keeping anything scheduled or consistent, so most of the time my writing is more or less spur of the moment. The main reason why I got into writing though is because of how many indie games I've played that I feel never blew up in the way they should. I think indie devs almost always deserve someone to cheerlead for them, to show that their art is recognized and what they're doing is cool. And it's sad when these cool games go unrecognized and sink below everything else.
Dev
To be completely honest I have done very little personal dev work since being laid off. Most of that time has been spent practicing for interviews, tech assignments and trying to sharpening my skills seemingly to no avail. It's not that I don't enjoy it; when I can muster up the energy and willpower I greatly enjoy working in Godot. I've had a few ideas bouncing around in my noisy brain that I want to iterate on and turn into fully fledged experiences. But it's incredibly difficult for me to take that first step, to build something from the bottom up. It's one of those reasons why I greatly respect indie devs, because they have that drive to take that step and turn their ideas into something real. In a way, my lack of drive turns into a sort of self-annoyance: I've had a full year to potentially put something together and I just can't.
The future
I have a couple of other writing pieces I'm slowly refining. I enjoy my roguelites series quite a bit since it's an opportunity to reflect on why I like certain mechanics or games so much; but going the extra mile to get appropriate screenshots and really refine my posts takes that extra bit of energy that can be hard to conjure up.
There's all kinds of different things I've thought about branching off into as well. I used to stream a long time ago and I've wanted to get back into that, or doing proper videos on some of the games I post about. Just as usual the struggle is reaching that threshold of energy and motivation that lets me then do it and stick to it.
It's hard to tell if these issues are because of my ADHD or if there's something else beneath the surface sapping my energy, made exponentially difficult by how healthcare works in the US. For reference I'm currently on Apple Health (WA's version of Medicaid) but come January 2027 they'll be instituting a work requirement which means if I'm still in job searching mode the odds are I'll have to just pay healthcare out of pocket personally. Jobs outside of my experience would never bother to hire me (the 'overqualification' problem: why hire someone that would likely leave the moment they got a job in their field of expertise) so I would be stuck still searching for a proper software engineering role. Or at least figuring out if I can do contractual or short term software work, though I haven't seen many opportunities there either.
I'm not going to get into my feelings around AI here either, I laid that down pretty well in my last piece which somehow went viral. I did see all the posts on HN responding to that piece though, thankfully I know better than to engage directly but it's very funny to see someone call me a 'neurotic cybersocialist'. HN is not exactly beating its reputation here.
Despite all of the above I still feel hopeful for the future. There's always something new on the horizon to look forward to and I'm generally in good health. So I'll continue to just take things a couple steps at a time and try to be a bit less reclusive about it.