Burnout from Social Media Posting and Waiting for Renders

For a few years, my life revolved around two things: client work and posting online.

Eventually, that rhythm became unsustainable, and it pushed me to step away from social media and rethink my career direction. Burnout was part of it, but not the whole story. At the time, most of my work was VFX, motion design, and video editing for clients. My workflow was mostly built around After Effects: real footage, tracking, and layered effects. It was intense, but manageable.

When the Workflow Was Still Simple

Back in Manchester, I worked on an old 2012 MacBook Pro with upgraded RAM and 1TB of storage. It was not a perfect machine, but it got the job done.

Later, I moved to a gaming laptop for faster workflows. Then I built a full Windows workstation with a stronger CPU and GPU. That setup made everything faster in After Effects and helped me push better quality in 3D-assisted edits.

At that stage, I felt in control. I had my own process and understood every part of it.

What Changed: 3D Entered the Pipeline

The real problem started when I began integrating more serious 3D into client work.

Before that, I used Cinema 4D mostly for separate design pieces. Later, I combined it with After Effects in one pipeline:

1. track footage in After Effects
2. export and move the scene to Cinema 4D
3. build lighting and 3D elements
4. render in Octane
5. return to compositing and revisions

That pipeline gave me the visual realism I wanted, but it was dramatically slower than pure After Effects work.

Iterations became painful. A change that used to take minutes could suddenly take hours.

The Burnout Loop

At the same time, I was posting constantly on social media and handling many client projects.

My days became a loop around render management:

• start a heavy render at night
• wait 6 to 8 hours
• check the output in the morning
• find artifacts or errors
• restart the process

I even remember remote-connecting from vacations just to restart broken renders or fix small issues. Work was everywhere: evenings, weekends, holidays, family time.

I was always checking messages, email, revisions, and client feedback. It stopped being just creative work and became a stress system I lived inside.

Creative Fatigue and Career Shift

I still produced strong results and delivered many projects, but the process was exhausting.

The slowness of rendering and the pressure of constant output gradually killed my energy. I also felt creatively constrained by the pipeline itself.

Eventually, I moved away from that path and shifted toward product design, web design, and engineering roles. I still did occasional 3D work for a while, but it was never the same intensity.

Around that period, I also stopped posting on social media, which felt strange after years of publishing so consistently.

Closing the Loop in 2026

Now, in 2026, I feel like I am closing the loop.

I have much stronger engineering skills than before, and I still have my creative foundation from motion and 3D. I am also exploring Blender more deeply now, alongside everything I learned from Cinema 4D.

The difference today is that the tooling is far better. Many tasks that once required long render pipelines can now be explored much faster with modern AI video workflows.

So this is not just a burnout story. It is also a comeback story.

I stepped away, learned new systems, and now I am returning with better tools, better perspective, and a healthier way of building and sharing.