And even if someone spent their time video gaming and doing drugs why can't they turn their life around if they want and demonstrate to have the skill. Burnout, depression, horrible circumstances and families all exists and sometimes you have to hit a stable rock bottom to start climbing.

Yes. I can see why people might be wary although I don't necessarily agree with those who would be (excessively) wary.

why would I care as an employer that you spent a year playing video games and doing drugs?

When I interview people I couldn't care less about any gaps in their resume, we're going to sit down, talk about tech, what you've done and what we need, etc. If there's a match in skills, needs, personality and expectations then that's it, anything else are invisible cargo-cult walls

You might care about their judgement and their state of mind and whether they'd be prepared for the job. I think understanding what someone did in a long gap is important - some are just very easy to understand (person in 20's decides to quit job for a year to go backpacking) while others might be harder. If I was interviewing I wouldn't ever automatically discard a resume because of a long gap, though, so I suppose I'm just thinking of what others might be cautious about, and other people may simply adopt a heuristic to automatically discard to minimise variance.

I've taken sixth months off and mostly played video games and no one ever cared or asked??!

Yep same here. When I ran out of money I thought I'd better start writing some code lol

I'm actually very glad this is the case.

> It really should be put in the context of someone's life.

Absolutely agree.