Death of the artist or the end of creative hobbies

I used to maintain a webcomic, while I put some effort into it I didn't take it hugely seriously - I would spend a sunday afternoon drawing a single page in a long running narrative that sort of didn't go anywhere and sort of did - and I would map out the action and write the dialog, and while I enjoyed the act for a while I would look at my google anylitics page for it and discover that nobody was actually reading it. And more and more I grew to hate working on it because what was the point. Even in the small local comic discord I was in, people weren't reacting to my posts. This created a feedback loop where I hated working on the comic more and more, and couldn't put the same amount of effort into it. Eventually I posted a blank page that read "I quit" as the final page of the comic and every year I renew the domain, thinking that eventually I'd pick it back up or not. 

Videogames are also a sort of hobby of mine. for years I didn't want to call my videogame projects "Hobbies" because that felt like I wasn't giving it enough passion or attention, it's what I do for a living and working on a long 5-6 year project is what helped me gain real skills I use everyday at work. Game companies rarely give you the kind of work that you can build a career on, at least in my experience, so if I wanted to write a narrative for a game then I would have to also make the game along with it. There's probably a longer post about Crystal Slaves, the game I spent 5-6 years on - while the people who played it got the game's themes and it succeeded in imparting the narrative that I had set for it, it got maybe less than 1000 downloads. Partially because it's a buggy mess, partially because I was too afraid of playtesting it. 

It took a long time for me to want to start making games again. I made a small bitsy thing in an afternoon to work my way through burnout. I made a small platformer in GBStudio and enjoyed the process of making levels and sprites without having to worry about pesky things like implementation or coding collision logic. But these days I just tend to open Godot once in a while and poke at one or two things that may never be full time projects, and kind of yern for the momentum I had several years ago. I don't know if I have another long term project in me anymore, and it feels like I got my one and only shot with Crystal Slaves, which didn't exactly do what I wanted it to. So these days I'm like "what do i even do anymore, creatively?" 

Having to feel like I need to restart the process of drawing, or the process of making a game project, feels impossible. I haven't been able to find a real game making community that motivated me to participate more, because it feels like after all these years I should be a lot better at things. I can't find a comic community anymore because, uh, it just doesn't feel like they exist anymore. 

I defined myself as being a creative person maybe hoping that someday I'd be recognized as a creative person and lift myself out of the drugery that defined a lot of my career as a game developer. That's very probably not happening, given that a lot of the creative work I strive for is awarded to 2nd generation rich kids. It feels like the moment has passed. It feels like everything is just tiktok now. Nobody reads webcomics anymore. There are thousands of games getting released every second, and it seems like getting noticed is now impossible. 

Having been stuck in this creative limbo for maybe a year now, and seeing my own years tick on, I feel more and more anxious to get back to some kind of creative outlet. But like, when is the burnout going to lift? When is my life going to have some level of stability and positive feedback that will allow for creative work again? When am I not going to constantly be stressing about my job, or my housing situation, or both? 

We are supposed to have freedom of expression, but I don't feel very free.