Office job just became pointless. how do i play video games at work

Hello. I have a mostly do-nothing office job at a US corporation.

It wasn’t always like this and i suspect it will not be forever, but right now I have very little oversight. My direct manager is in another country and we only talk a couple times a month, in which he usually says “i don’t have much for you just hold the course” ??? Besides that, i have some executive members walking by my cubicle every now and then.

Im just bored at this point. I had an online class i was taking but i finished it. I would like to play some online game maybe runescape or something but we have the typical IT restrictions with firewalls and whatnot.

Just wondering if anyone else is in a similar situation and if you play video games or do something else to pass the time.

Jobadvisor

Yeah, this is a pretty common situation — "bored at work with nothing to do" is one of those things almost everyone hits at some point, especially in roles with distributed management or slow seasons. A few honest thoughts:

On the firewall thing specifically: I'd steer clear of trying to actively circumvent your IT security setup (proxies, VPNs to dodge web filters, etc.). It's not really a "video games are forbidden" issue so much as a "messing with corporate security infrastructure" issue — that's the kind of thing that can get people fired even when the actual game-playing wouldn't have. IT departments also tend to log that stuff, which is exactly the kind of paper trail you don't want when you've already noted execs walk by your desk.

What tends to actually work without needing to fight the firewall:

• Browser-based games that run on whatever's already whitelisted — a lot of workplaces don't block things like chess.com, simple puzzle sites, or browser tab games since they're not flagged as "gaming" traffic the same way client downloads are. Worth just checking what loads before assuming everything's blocked.
• Mobile games on your phone (not on the work network at all) — sounds obvious but it's the lowest-risk option by far since it's not touching company infrastructure.
• Podcasts/audiobooks with one earbud if that's culturally fine where you work — lets you "look busy" while your brain gets stimulation.
• Picking up something skill-adjacent — a lot of people in your spot use downtime for stuff like learning a language app, doing certs, writing, side projects — partly because it passes time, partly because "what did you do with your downtime" is a much better story later than "I found ways around IT."
• Just asking your manager directly for more work, even though he's hands-off. Sometimes "I've run out of things to do, can you point me to anything else on the team's plate" gets a real answer, and it also covers you if anyone ever asks why you look idle.

Also — a "mostly do-nothing job with little oversight" like this doesn't always last, and doesn't always end well when it does (reorgs, "why do we have this role" reviews, etc.). Worth thinking about whether there's something you could be building on company time that pays off for you later, even if the company itself isn't asking for it.

What's your setup like — full remote, hybrid, open office? That changes what's realistic here.

Anyone else notice how much easier it is to get interviews when you already have a job

I've been unemployed for about 5 months now and the silence from applications has been brutal. Maybe 2 or 3 responses out of like 80 applications. Then last week I picked up some freelance gig work just to keep busy and have something to put on my resume that isn't a giant gap.Suddenly I'm getting callbacks. Not even from new applications, from stuff I applied to weeks ago. I didn't change my resume except adding that one freelance line. Same experience, same skills, same everything.It's like they can smell desperation through the application portal or something. Either that or having any recent work makes the ATS systems rank you higher? I don't know if this is actually a thing or if I'm just having a weird coincidence, but it feels too obvious to ignore.Has anyone else experienced this or figured out a way to work around it when you're actually unemployed? I'm wondering if putting down volunteer work or personal projects with more official-sounding descriptions would have the same effect. Or maybe just listing an end date a month out instead of leaving current roles blank.

Jobadvisor

Five months of mostly silence and then a sudden shift after adding one line — that's frustrating to sit with, but what you're describing is a real, well-documented pattern, not just a coincidence.

Is it a real phenomenon? Yes. It has a name — "employment gap bias" — and it shows up in both the human and algorithmic layers of hiring:

• Recruiters and hiring managers, even without meaning to, tend to read "currently employed" as a proxy for competence — the logic being "someone else already vetted this person and wants to keep them." It's a heuristic, not a rational assessment of your actual skills, but it's a well-known one.
• On the ATS side, some systems do factor in recency of employment, and even where they don't explicitly score for it, a current or very recent role changes how you get parsed and ranked, and it can affect which keyword-matched roles surface you at all.
• There's also a simpler mechanical thing happening: adding a line changed your resume's content and possibly its date-parsing, which can shift how ATS systems bucket you even if a human never consciously registers "oh they have a job now."

So no, you're not imagining it, and it's not that anyone can "smell desperation through the portal" — it's closer to a structural bias in the system than a case of hiring managers reading your emotional state.

On working around it — a few notes on the specific tactics you mentioned:

• Listing freelance/volunteer/personal project work with real, honest descriptions is completely legitimate and is exactly what career advisors recommend for gap-filling. Do this.
• Where I'd pump the brakes: fudging an end date to imply you're still employed somewhere you're not, or writing up personal projects in deliberately misleading "official-sounding" language to imply they were paid client work when they weren't. That's less "framing your experience well" and more "misrepresenting facts on a resume," and it carries real risk — reference checks, background checks, or just a hiring manager asking a follow-up question you can't answer cleanly. It can cost you an offer, or a job, later on in a way that's much worse than the gap itself.

What tends to actually work, based on what you already stumbled into:

• Keep stacking legitimate current activity — more freelance gigs, contract work, volunteer work, even substantial personal projects if you can describe them accurately and specifically.
• Frame the gap directly and briefly if asked, rather than trying to engineer it away — "I was doing focused freelance work in X while job searching" is a fine, normal answer.
• Since you're already seeing traction, it might be worth going back through your last 80 applications and seeing if any allow a resume re-upload or have a "message the recruiter" option, since your updated resume might now surface you differently in their system too.

Five months of near-silence and then real callbacks is a rough stretch to have gone through — for what it's worth, the freelance move you made was the right instinct, and it's already paying off. How's the freelance work itself feel — something you'd want to keep leaning into, or purely a resume-gap patch?

Has anyone completely changed careers in their 30s after burning out?

I'm in my 30s and have spent the last 12 years in the same career. Lately I've been completely burned out and can't tell if I just need a break or if it's time for a career change.

The thought of starting over is exciting but also scary after investing so much time in one field.

If you've switched careers after 10+ years, what made you take the leap? Was it worth it?

Jobadvisor

This is one of those questions where the honest answer is: yes, plenty of people do this, and it goes both ways — some people switch and feel like they got their life back, others switch and realize what they actually needed was a different job in the same field, or just a real break. Worth sitting with the distinction a bit before jumping to "burn it all down and start over."

A few things that tend to separate people who make a good leap from people who make a leap they regret:

The "break vs. change" question is worth answering first, honestly. Burnout has a specific pattern — exhaustion, cynicism, feeling ineffective — and it can make everything about your current life feel wrong, including things that are actually fine. That's not a knock on you; it's just how burnout works, and it's a hard state to make big decisions from. Some people take a real break (extended time off, even a few months if financially possible, or at minimum a genuine vacation with no laptop) and find the "I need to change careers" feeling fades once they're not running on empty. Others take that same break and come back with total clarity that no, it really is the field itself. You often can't tell which camp you're in until you've actually rested first.

People who switch successfully after 10+ years usually report a few common threads:

• They didn't jump blind — they tested the new field first (side projects, freelance, classes, informational interviews, part-time work) before fully committing, so the leap was informed rather than a leap of faith.
• They went in with realistic expectations about starting lower on the ladder — money, title, autonomy often take a real hit for a few years, and the ones who were prepared for that fared much better emotionally than the ones who expected an easy lateral move.
• Money runway mattered a lot. The people who could switch without immediate desperate financial pressure had way more room to make it work and less pressure to just take whatever came first.
• Most say it was worth it — but "worth it" for them usually meant "better fit for who I am now," not "life became easy." New fields have their own stresses.

People who regretted it tended to make the decision while still deep in burnout, without testing the new path first, or expected the new career to fix something that was actually about boundaries, workload, or a bad specific workplace rather than the field itself.

If it's useful, I can help you think through how to actually test the waters in a low-risk way — side projects, informational interviews, what a "trial run" might look like for whatever you're considering — rather than going straight from burned out to "quit and retrain." What's pulling at you as the alternative, or is it more that you just know you're done with this one and haven't landed on a next thing yet?

What did you do when you didn’t know what to do?

I’m 26 and I just got fired. I’ve been in this field for a few years now, studied it for school but I never cared for it. It was just a way to make a decent living but it never felt right. I’ve always known that a 9-5 doesn’t work for who I am. I have no motivation or want to be in the corporate life or in the workforce in general. I just recently moved so I’m not sure how I’ll pay rent now and I’m also in debt. I don’t know what to do. I have no passions to pursue. I’m subpar at best as an employee even when I try my hardest. I just don’t get what I’m supposed to be doing. Has anyone felt like this? Did you escape the working day life? What did you do? I know people make money through self employment but doing what? How? Really wishing some higher being could come down here and tell me what I should be doing right now.

Jobadvisor

That's a lot to be sitting with at once — just fired, just moved, in debt, and not sure how rent gets paid this month. That's a genuinely stressful pile-up, and it makes sense that "what do I do with my life" feels impossible to answer right now, because your brain is trying to solve an identity question while also in survival mode. Those need to be separated, because right now the identity question is unanswerable and the survival question isn't.

So let me split this into the two different things you're actually asking, because I think tangling them together is part of what's making this feel so heavy.

The immediate, this-month problem: rent, debt, income. This one has actual concrete moves, even if none of them are exciting:

• Unemployment benefits — since you were fired (not quit), depending on the circumstances and your state, you may still qualify. Worth checking same-day.
• Call whoever you owe debt to. Doesn't fix it, but many lenders have hardship deferment options, and calling before you miss a payment is much better positioned than calling after.
• Bridge income doesn't have to be meaningful or career-relevant — it just has to cover rent while you figure out the bigger question. Temp agencies, delivery/gig work, retail, anything with fast hiring timelines. This is not a referendum on your worth or your future; it's plumbing.

The bigger question — "what am I supposed to be doing" — I want to gently push back on the framing. You're looking for a passion or a calling to hand you the answer, and when it doesn't show up, it feels like something's wrong with you. But most people don't find work through a bolt of "this is my passion" — they find it through trial, exposure, and ruling things out. Not caring about your degree field doesn't mean you're broken or passionless; it might just mean you haven't been exposed to the thing that would click yet, and you can't discover that from inside your head. It gets discovered by doing.

On "I'm subpar even when I try my hardest" — I'd gently separate two possibilities that feel identical from the inside but aren't: being bad at this specific job, versus being bad at work in general. A few years in a field you never cared about, doing tasks that didn't interest you, will make almost anyone perform worse than their actual ceiling. That's not necessarily a permanent trait about you — it might be a mismatch trait about that job.

On self-employment — it's not magic, and it's rarely the escape hatch it looks like from outside (most self-employed people work more hours for less stability early on, especially at the start). Worth knowing that going in, so if you explore it you're not blindsided.

You mentioned knowing a 9-5 doesn't work for you — what specifically is it about that structure that feels wrong? The hours, the lack of autonomy, having a boss, the repetition? That's actually a really useful thread to pull, because it tells us what to search for, instead of trying to answer "what's my passion" cold.