First I want to say that I agree and wish there was more support for journalism. I have been craving more depth and nuance in reporting, to read about different potential outcomes, pros and cons of different decisions, etc. And I can’t imagine how bad a world without properly vetted news would be. It already seems like enough people are way too happy to just read whatever an algorithm feeds them.

Secondly, about the job market and changing careers, I get how you feel. I work in software and feel similarly about it (though maybe we’re lucky compared to journalists), and I feel the same about life in general. Everything has gone to shit. I wrote a long rant about how hopeless the future seems, but I realized it’s probably off topic.

It’s just hard to imagine any path where the job market improves, and where society gets better.

If someone has some optimism to share, it’d be much appreciated. I’m ready to quit my job due to burnout, but I don’t even know what I’d do instead. I can’t imagine just watching shows or playing video games for more than a few hours per day. I’d love to get into volunteering, but it seems like a big commitment and a lot of work.

It is fairly difficult, but there are a few reasons why I found the difficulty more pleasant:

• pacing: the most difficult parts you’ll first encounter are optional bonus objectives (strawberries) that you can skip and come back to later. So you can take your time and get them as you go when you feel like it, and if you get frustrated you can continue with the main storyline for a bit (this happened to me a few times when I was playing, so it was basically continuous enjoyment)
• very forgiving: in Hollow Knight, it’s like Dark Souls where if you die, you lose your in-game currency and need to make your way back to your corpse to recover it, and if you die again then you lose it completely. But in Celeste, you get a checkpoint at every “screen”, so it’s very forgiving to experiment new techniques and just keep trying over and over again. There are some longer patches so that it doesn’t feel too easy, but overall I really liked it
• most of the storyline is accessible without having to do much extra. There are some more challenging levels at the end that require finding some hidden unlocks earlier in the game, and beating some tougher challenges that I’m going through now.

But fair point, even the base storyline is quite challenging, especially if you don’t love this genre. I’ll edit my comment to be more clear. They do add some “assist mode” to make it easier if you want to enjoy the story, but I’m not sure if it’s still fun to play it that way.

I recently discovered Celeste and love it so far. It’s a skilled platformer that doesn’t seem as punishing (edit) compared to other platformers that I’ve played, but still challenging enough to be satisfying. (edit: And the base story difficulty is not as bad as some other platformer games). The story is also really nice (overcoming depression and mental health stuff), not something I usually play but I was really engaged with it, and communicated in a nice simple way (not a ton of cutscenes like story-heavy games). edit: Celeste is similar to Hollow Knight, though I got stuck at a part of Hollow Knight and haven’t picked it back up in a while. Celeste is much easier than N++ and Super Meat Boy, IMO.

(I had intended to play it on my 4k TV, but I found that it has a significant delay that makes it hard, and I somehow didn’t notice it in other games. It’s much easier to play on my PC).

Also RE the OP’s mention of simple phone games, I really like “Simon Tatham’s Puzzles”: iOS, Android on Google Play and F-Droid. It’s a collection of simple puzzle games that I enjoy idly playing for a few minutes at a time.

I’ve been interested in that! How do you like it compare to games like OpenTTD, Cities: Skylines, and Factorio (sort of)?

I love the trains in Factorio, and I enjoyed trying out OpenTTD for a bit, but I eventually got bored with it because airlines were easy money, and it was too easy to lose money when building a train network, and it took too long to expand. In Cities: Skylines I could never really figure out how to fix traffic, I felt like silly little things were causing it to back up. I don’t think I ever really got seriously into rail traffic in it, though.