At least in my experience, enjoyable work on a project you have control over is quite different from working on projects for the corporate overlords with unreasonable expectations and deadlines. The former can be a really good outlet to remind you how rewarding work can be when you have control of how, when and what you work on.

You are completely jumping to the conclusion that he has not done anything else to deal with that burnout. What do you think the solution is to burnout, never working again?

He could have also taken the time not working to deal with and recover from it before deciding he wanted to explore those themes in his next game when he did start working on one again.

It probably is irrational, but humans are pretty irrational.

I think this kind of tension is inevitable when so many people say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Many people with work burnout tried that, and found that they came to hate the thing they love.

Often, when we get stuck in that rut, we can’t undo the harm that it’s done to our passion, and retraining in a different field may be difficult or impossible. Maybe there was a period where it was possible to toe thelp line and make a career out of a hobby, and an attempt to regain some elements of that. In many cases, it’s dumb as hell to keep throwing oneself at the same thing that made someone burnt out in the first place but sometimes, reclaiming something they love is liberating and healing.

I say this speaking as an academic who has always found it hard to separate my work from what I love doing, because even my “extracurricular” projects tend to have a fair bit of overlap with my work. I sometimes wish that I was someone who could have a clear divide between work and fun, but to do that, I’d need to find work much further away from my passions.

I guess every artist of any kind ever is irrational.