Half Life 2 doesn’t truly need the first one. It adds some context and there’s some callbacks, but you can totally start with 2.
Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, in HL1 something goes wrong at a research facility. Main character fights his way through then gets “knocked out” at the end. HL2 picks up ~20 years later after an entirely new big bad took advantage of the events in HL1 and conquered the world. MC “wakes up” and is dropped right in on a train into an occupied city.
There’s decent plot connections, but you aren’t missing out on anything gameplay wise or largely plot impacting, as the game world has changed so drastically.
All that said, if you want to play HL1 and aren’t interested in it in terms of it as a tech marvel of the time it was created, you can just play Black Mesa. It’s a fan remake that got the greenlight from the original creators to be sold, and by most accounts is a better experience for modern gamers.
For context, Bethesda provided minimal support to Obsidian and gave them an absolutely absurdly short development time frame to make the game in. I think it was only a year.
The bugginess isn’t all their fault. The game director even released a free mod or two after the game released to do some rebalancing and add a survival mode to it.
If you play RoR2 on PC, you owe it to yourself to install some Quality of Life mods, like one that fixes or improves the game’s built in one shot protection. Also, auto sprint.
Dear god. I burned out around your age with a similar work schedule. Less commute but more work hours. Took me years to recover.
If your situation allows, please find yourself a better work and commute setup. Your boss isn’t going to care that you’re dying inside, especially when they’ve grown accustomed to everything you get done running yourself ragged. If you can, start doing less at work so you have energy to search for other jobs.
In some workplaces, it’s actually better to let things slip so your boss can push for more manpower.