A burned-out tech worker quit her job at a gaming company to spend time filming ocean critters. It helped her reset.

• Daina Buchner quit her tech job at a gaming company last year over burnout concerns.
• Buchner, 39, now spends her days capturing videos and photos of ocean animals with her drone. 
• The transition was tough, but it gave her time to rethink her relationship with work and productivity.

Work can consume your life, so much so that it can lead to burnout. 

That is why Daina Buchner, a former tech worker based in San Diego, decided to leave her job  — one she said she loved — at a gaming company to focus on one of her favorite pastimes: spending time in the ocean. 

When Buchner, 39, wasn't working, she would moonlight as an underwater photographer, ocean videographer, and a licensed drone pilot — hobbies that have grown into passion projects over the last five years. Buchner's thirst for immortalizing aquatic life has led her into the hidden depths of the ocean. She has snorkeled in the kelp forest of California's Channel Islands and has explored marine habitats in Ecuador's Galápagos Islands by boat.

Throughout her adventures, she has captured shots of a baby harbor seal falling asleep, a gray whale calve swimming with her baby by her side, and a winking manatee underwater. 

Leaving her job gave Buchner more time to spend with ocean critters. But despite the tough transition, Buchner said she is now starting to see her burnout disappear and is trying to adopt a healthier approach to work-life balance. 

'Eventually, I just hit a wall'

Buchner's decision to take a sabbatical was years in the making. Around the end of 2018, Buchner, who was working on a research project related to user experience, said she found herself working 50 to 60 hours each week, including weekends.

The period led to burnout, which Buchner described as "mental exhaustion." Once home, all she wanted was to mentally check out by binging Netflix and scrolling through social media for hours. Loved ones noticed and told her she looked stressed out. 

It all came to a head in 2020 when the pandemic hit and she broke her foot. After taking time to get surgery and heal, she said she returned to work "physically and mentally exhausted." At the same time, she said she had to change course on a project she was working on for years in a matter of "weeks or months."

Her team was working hard and doing well, she said. But at that point, the burnout started to really kick in. She powered through her mental exhaustion thinking that it would only be temporary, but the grind never stopped. 

"Eventually, I just hit a wall," Buchner said. She decided to go on leave in July of last year.

"I realized that I just needed to take a breather, and focus on myself, my outside interests, and the close relationships I have in life with my family and friends," she said.

Buchner said the first few months were tough. She said she felt "cycles of anxiety" around finances as she had to dip into her savings and readjust her budget.

"When I first quit, I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, like, did I just blow up my whole career?'" she said. "What if I need to go back? What if I have a hard time finding a job? What if I'm destitute on the streets after this? Did I just blow up everything that was all that was good in my life?"

The sudden change of pace was also jarring. There was no sense of urgency to do anything, she said. 

"I went from going at 110 miles power per hour to a screeching halt," she said.   

Buchner — an experienced drone pilot and ocean diver who previously vacationed in places where she could dive — spent her newly found free time capturing photos and videos of marine wildlife. She posted the clips of humpback whales and sea turtles on Instagram, an account she started 10 years ago, and TikTok, which she made at the start of the pandemic.

As Buchner's popularity in the ocean community grew — she now has almost 90,000 combined followers on TikTok and Instagram — people and companies began to reach out, asking to license her videos. She helped capture footage for an episode on the Discovery Channel show "Nature in Focus," worked with the Ocean Conservancy on a campaign to help raise money for research to influence conservation policy, and licensed videos to a handful of documentaries and mini-series focused on the environment. 

Most days are spent "staring at the open ocean" waiting for a glimpse of an animal like, say, a spout of a whale, so she can fly her drone over the animal to capture its behavior. Depending on the speed of certain animals, she said some days feel meditative while other days can be adrenaline inducing.

The goal of this work, she said, is to help viewers "create a connection" with marine animals and highlight some of the challenges they're facing, such as plastic waste contamination. 

On leave, Buchner now spends roughly five hours each day flying her drone on a beach or a boat in San Diego and trimming her videos; she spends another 10 to 15 hours a week working on her social media pages. 

More than six months after leaving her job, Buchner said she is rethinking her approach to work.

Buchner found she had the tendency to dedicate all her time and energy into a project. It is why she felt the need to spend "every minute of every day" being productive. Now, she is able to "sit and enjoy" whatever she's doing, whether that's reading a book or binging Netflix. 

Her most significant realization, however, was how rigid she had been in her approach to life. Like the ocean's weather patterns, she found that it is impossible to plan for everything and that despite the unpredictability of life, everything will turn out okay. It's a mindset that Buchner said she can apply to her job.  

While Buchner loves her ocean conservation work, she doesn't intend to pursue it as a full-time career anytime soon. She makes "some money" from it, she said, but it doesn't replace the income she was making in tech, nor is it enough to pay the bills. 

"I don't know if this will necessarily turn into a full-time thing," she told Insider. "But I think, if anything, it's always going to be a part of my life."