When I was a kid, I could play RuneScape for countless hours.
I didn’t need to justify it. I could fish, mine, wander around, abuse the Grand Exchange and watch a number slowly climb. Later, there was Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty. Even a few years ago, I could lose myself in Stardew Valley.
Now I struggle to begin.
Since leaving Communiti Labs, I have deliberately given myself a couple of months to recover from three years of day-in-day-out grinding. I wanted to use some of that time to get back into games that I loved.
A new RuneScape account feels like an enormous grind I have already completed. Escape from Tarkov feels like another repetitive loop: loot, survive, upgrade, fight, lose gear and begin again. I can see the machinery too clearly. Grind, upgrade, slay, repeat.
That change makes me surprisingly sad. Games were a large part of my life and one of the ways I relaxed. At first, I wondered whether I had simply grown out of them.
The more uncomfortable question is whether I have lost some of my ability to do anything that doesn’t produce a useful result.
The third time I’ve written about burnout
I have written about burnout twice before.
In Burnout; let’s talk about it, I wrote about working through lunch, continuing late into the night and gradually feeling more like a machine than a person. I had discovered that I could sustain a ridiculous amount of work. I had not yet understood how thoroughly it would catch up with me.
In a newsletter the following year, I wrote about getting close to burnout again. At the time, I described my hobbies as work and, well, work. The lesson I thought I needed to learn was how to leave the job at the door.
Both pieces were about the danger of doing too much and noticing the warning signs before I went too far.
This time, I am thinking about what happens after the work stops.
I don’t know whether burnout is the right label for what I am experiencing now. I am not a psychologist, and a conversation is not a diagnosis. But I have noticed a relationship between productivity, anxiety, leisure and identity that feels too important to dismiss as merely losing interest in games.
Real life became the better progression system
Part of the problem may be that I have built and run multiple businesses.
The loop inside many games can be abstracted fairly easily:
effort → reward → increased capability → harder challenge → larger reward → repeat
Entrepreneurship offers an alarmingly similar loop. Learn to sell. Build a product. Win a customer. Hire someone. Enter a new market. Solve the next problem. Each step creates more capability and usually reveals a harder challenge behind it.
The difference is that the rewards persist when I shut my laptop.
Hours in RuneScape might leave me with more imaginary coins. Hours spent building something might leave me with a new feature, a customer, a piece of machinery, a better process or a skill I can use again tomorrow.
Reality is also a much deeper system. RuneScape has an experience table and a wiki. Someone has calculated the optimal method. There was no wiki explaining the optimal strategy for building Communiti Labs. Customers behaved unexpectedly. Competitors reacted. Technology changed. We made decisions with incomplete information, and the outcome mattered to real people.
Once I had experienced that, I can see why some games began to feel hollow.
It may also explain why the games I used to enjoy now feel strangely like work. RuneScape asks me to optimise a system. Stardew Valley asks me to manage resources. Tarkov asks me to acquire resources, manage risk and improve my capability. After spending a day thinking about systems, products, people, strategy and money, another system to optimise may no longer be a particularly effective escape.
Perhaps I have not fallen out of love with play. Perhaps progression games are simply competing with a richer version of the same experience.
While that explanation is comforting, it’s also incomplete.
Ninety minutes with no problem to solve
Last week, I attended a conference for the team I will be joining in a couple of months—exciting news coming. There was a 90-minute gap between sessions, so I went back to my room, lay on the bed and watched some YouTube to pass the time.
There was nothing wrong. Nobody needed anything from me. I had permission to do absolutely nothing.
Yet I found it incredibly unnerving.
I felt useless and helpless, as though the absence of something to do was itself a problem.
That experience was very different from running Communiti Labs. The stress of leading a company could be unpleasant, but it usually came with an identifiable action. A customer had a problem. The product needed work. The pipeline was weak. Cash needed attention. A decision had to be made.
Pressure could become action. Action could become progress. Progress brought relief.
That is an extremely effective way to deal with discomfort—until there is nothing to act upon.
One possibility I am sitting with is that years of operating this way trained me to depend on agency. Being useful gave me competence, control and a clear role. When there was no problem to solve, I did not experience the gap as rest. I experienced it as helplessness.
I wasn’t helpless. Nothing required my help.
That distinction is difficult to ignore.
Preference or a cage?
There is nothing inherently wrong with preferring active leisure. I enjoy fishing. I enjoy a long lunch. I do not need to spend Sunday on the couch watching Netflix for my life to count as balanced.
But there is a difference between saying, “I would rather build something than watch a movie”, and saying, “I find it difficult to tolerate myself doing something that isn’t useful”.
The first is a preference.
The second can become a cage.
My relationship with fiction makes that distinction particularly clear. The last novel I read for leisure was Project Hail Mary. If you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for? Before that, I think it may have been high school. I have come to think that reading fiction is a waste of my time—not anyone else’s time, specifically mine.
I know how strange that is. Some of the greatest writing ever produced is fiction, and I recognise that I am depriving myself of it. Yet when I imagine sitting down with a novel, a part of my brain asks what I will have to show for those hours.
The same question can be applied to a movie, an afternoon on the couch or a game that leaves me with nothing durable once I turn it off.
There is an internal rule hiding underneath all of this:
My time ought to produce something.
That rule has helped me build businesses, products and a life that I care about. I do not want to get rid of my ambition or my love of meaningful work.
I am beginning to suspect that the rule has also become too powerful.
Leisure does not need a return on investment
The obvious response would be to make leisure useful.
I could read historical fiction because I am learning history. I could watch documentaries instead of films. I could play strategy games because they improve my thinking. I could listen to a business podcast while fishing.
Soon enough, recreation would become another department of Dan Ferguson Pty Ltd.
That might make the discomfort go away, but it would leave the underlying rule untouched. I would still be allowed to rest only after presenting a business case for it.
That isn’t entirely hypothetical.
Most days recently, I have taken the dogs for an hour-long walk around the block. I have found ChatGPT Voice unexpectedly useful on those walks: a way to flesh out an idea, test it or document a rumination before it disappears.
The dogs get out, I get out, and a vague thought often comes home in a clearer state. Yet the routine also lets me kill two birds with one stone. The walk becomes leisure without requiring me to relinquish usefulness completely.
I have made a similar bargain with exercise. Since leaving Communiti Labs, I have decided to get serious about my health: lose a significant amount of weight, improve my VO2 max and improve the “biological age” estimate in Bevel. If quantified feedback from a wearable motivates you, Bevel is genuinely worth a look. It has become part of how I track those goals.
The bargain is that I can give myself permission to do some “nothing” while my body is still doing something. I can work through my YouTube Watch Later playlist or watch something on Netflix while I run. That has led to regular 90-minute to two-hour jogs, almost daily, and has helped me get back onto the treadmill, rowing machine and weights bench.
Is that a healthy habit? In some ways, clearly. I am moving again and making progress towards goals that matter to me. In another sense, I am less sure. I have found a way to make Netflix acceptable because the treadmill is paying for it. Even my nothing is still required to produce something.
I don’t think that makes either routine bad. They are useful, enjoyable parts of my life. But they are examples of productive leisure, not evidence that I am comfortable with leisure that has no output at all.
The harder experiment may be to allow small amounts of leisure that I cannot justify.
Not hours of RuneScape. I doubt forcing myself through that would prove anything. Perhaps it is 30 minutes with a novel because I am curious about what happens next. Perhaps it is sitting somewhere beautiful without filling the silence with a podcast. Perhaps it is playing a game without caring whether I am progressing efficiently.
When the thought arrives that this is a waste of time, I do not necessarily need to prove it wrong. I could answer: correct, I am not trying to achieve anything right now.
The point would not be to discover the hidden return on investment of rest. It would be to practise being okay without one.
Learning to stop
The younger version of me could spend a Saturday fishing in RuneScape simply because he wanted to.
Perhaps what I miss is not RuneScape itself. I miss being able to become completely absorbed in something inconsequential without part of my brain prosecuting me for wasting time.
My earlier writing about burnout focused on learning when to stop. I thought the skill was noticing the warning signs, closing the laptop and leaving the work at the door.
I now think there may be another skill on the other side of that door.
It is the ability to act intensely when action is required, and to be still when it is not. Those are not opposites. One does not diminish the other.
If I had an entire day tomorrow with genuinely nothing useful to accomplish—and nobody would ever know how I spent it—what would I want to do?
At the moment, I am not sure I know.
That feels like a much more important question than whether I still enjoy video games.