There is a very specific kind of quiet exhaustion that hits you when you realise you no longer fit the profession you have spent fifteen years trying to perfectly master. If not the profession itself, losing spark over it seems to be the next best estimation of this feeling.
This realisation happened in one afternoon, with the monsoon rain hitting my home office window while I found myself staring blankly at an entirely empty Figma canvas.
My kid was sitting just a few feet away on the living room floor, carefully drawing a Pokemon with brightly coloured crayon sticks, perfectly content in their own little world of joy. Fully in control, ready to catch ‘em all.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t catch ‘em all. I mean the sparks. The sparks fluttered around, away and gone in a smoke like a ninja leaving the scene.
Looking at an empty Figma page, and a doc open on the side to write my notes. Usually I know what to do. But at that point I simply blanked out.
I’ve been doing this for years. And still, there’s a big chance of possibility that I will not be good enough. Then I’ll be fired.
That’s even the simplest example.
At one point, I was staring at a project at work that required a design system change, warranting a day to construct intricate components and endless nested variants for every conceivable state of a basic interface element.
I hate this kind of work. It’s over-engineered for the sake of consistency, that will always be misinterpreted by engineering anyway. One wrong methodology and hell breaks loose. You’re screwed and people judge you. Then I’ll be fired.
I looked at my kid who was perfectly happy with an imperfect sketch that she would forget in a month, and then I looked back at the over-engineered demands of modern product design, realising with heavy certainty that I simply do not care about any of it anymore.
I have been designing digital experiences since the late two thousands, accumulating titles at large organisations that should theoretically make me a highly sought after professional today. But if I am being brutally honest with myself, and with all of you who are taking the time to read this today, I am really not good enough for companies nowadays. Skills-wise, and motivations-wise.
The modern tech landscape demands a highly specific type of professional that I am slowly realising I might never actually be. That growing requirements is getting ridiculous. Call it what, product engineering? Product builder? Damn. What the hell.
For starters, in such a shame, I cannot even do complex components or auto layout variants properly on Figma, often finding myself completely lost and frustrated in the endless nested layers that younger designers seem to navigate with their eyes closed. I just care about solving the design problem.
Back in the days of early web design, when we had to hack our way to use a proper desktop font and write stylesheets entirely from scratch, the work felt very much like painting on a digital canvas with plenty of room for happy accidents.
Then, we still shipped stuff.
Today, it feels much more like managing a complex database of rigid rules and uncompromising constraints, which leaves me feeling completely disconnected from the joy of making things. Because of this monumental shift in how our daily work is structured, I find that I merely own the immediate output rather than the grand strategic outcomes that leadership loves to talk about endlessly in quarterly meetings. I frankly prefer to just finish designing the required screen, carefully hand it off to the developers who will actually build it, and move on with my quiet day rather than agonising over engagement metrics or retention funnels that I have very little actual control over.
Sometimes I hate design system.
Then, the other sides of things. Business and engineering.
This fundamental disconnect bleeds into the very core of how technology companies operate and value their employees. I simply do not understand the business side of things very well, and my grasp of the technical engineering aspects is equally lacking, which makes me feel like a weary dinosaur in an ecosystem that worships the mythical unicorn designer who can supposedly do absolutely everything flawlessly. When I sit in cross functional meetings with confident product managers and brilliant lead engineers who speak effortlessly in dense acronyms about server side rendering and aggressive market expansion strategies, I mostly just nod along quietly and wait patiently to be told what the interface actually needs to look like. I am not strategic in the slightest, possessing absolutely no grand visionary roadmap for where the product should be three years from now, mostly because I know from painful experience that startup roadmaps change completely every three months anyway.
All I care about is whether it will solve user problems, and hopefully it will solve business problems. I never begin with business problems. At least if I have the luxury to not get fired.
I have no personal growth strategy either, having long ago abandoned the exhausting idea of aggressively climbing the corporate ladder to become a distinguished design leader.
To be honest, I still want to climb it, but maybe in the right team.
To make matters even worse in these highly visible corporate environments, I am a notoriously bad verbal communicator when put on the spot, often freezing up and losing my train of thought completely when I am aggressively asked to defend a relatively simple design choice.
Perhaps my biggest sin in the unforgiving eyes of modern tech culture is that I simply do not work fast enough to keep up with a punishing cadence that worships speed above absolutely everything else.
It’s such a sin to go slow. What are you, a God?
We live in a chaotic era where product cycles are arbitrarily measured in two week sprints, and absolutely everyone is expected to operate at breakneck speeds while constantly proving their immense worth to the organization every single day. This crushing expectation to constantly demonstrate visible value is very often driven by a deep seated systemic anxiety from upper management rather than any actual pressing user needs. Microsoft published a comprehensive Work Trend Index report detailing a fascinating phenomenon they accurately call productivity paranoia, where a staggering eighty five percent of leaders report struggling to have confidence that their employees are actually being productive in hybrid settings, which violently forces workers to engage in exhausting performative overwork just to prove their worth, a dynamic you can explore further when you read the study here.
I am simply too tired and emotionally drained to play this performative game anymore, actively refusing to artificially inflate my velocity or pretend I am strategically mapping out the next five years of exponential product growth when I am actually just trying my absolute best to survive the week.
And then there is the completely inescapable topic of artificial intelligence that seems to dominate every single tech newsletter and podcast today, demanding our absolute attention and compliance. I genuinely cannot use AI effectively, despite the overwhelming barrage of thought leadership posts loudly telling me I will be entirely obsolete by tomorrow if I do not master advanced prompt engineering right now. The constant aggressive demand from leadership to seamlessly integrate artificial intelligence into our daily creative routines is frequently presented as a mandatory glorious evolution, yet it consistently creates significantly more problems than it actually solves for ordinary people like me.
A recent 2024 study conducted by Upwork investigating the so called AI paradox revealed that rather than magically saving time as promised, seventy seven percent of employees report that using AI tools has actually added substantially to their workloads and significantly increased burnout rates across the entire tech sector, which is an incredibly frustrating reality you can dig into the research.
I feel this painful reality deeply in my bones every single time I am instructed to just use generative tools to quickly output wireframes, consistently finding that I spend significantly more time attempting to meticulously fix the soulless generic outputs than I would have spent just designing the thing somewhat poorly by myself in the first place.
When you finally take a step back and strip away the towering unrealistic expectations of being a strategic business partner and a hyper efficient AI power user, what is actually left of my once ambitious career is surprisingly simple and quiet. I really just want to work for money, maintain a predictable balance with my personal life, and take care of my kid without feeling the crushing ever present guilt that tech culture often imposes on parents who dare to leave their laptops behind. Is that not okay?
This apparent lack of fiery ambition for corporate ladder climbing is entirely rooted in my profound desire to be physically and emotionally present for my family, which is a conscious deliberate choice that modern corporate culture subtly penalises but which everyday real people understand completely.
According to a detailed survey conducted by the Pew Research Center regarding modern family dynamics, seventy percent of working parents explicitly state that having flexibility on the job is the major deciding factor when handling unexpected childcare situations, prioritizing that flexibility far above traditional career advancement, a very human sentiment echoed widely when you read the survey. I am proudly unapologetically part of that specific statistic, happily trading the exhausting endless pursuit of becoming a principal designer for the quiet immensely fulfilling joy of being able to firmly close my laptop at five o'clock and sketch Pokemon characters with my kid.
There I finally said it, putting the quiet part out loud for everyone in the industry to see, risking judgment but gaining a massive amount of personal relief in the process.
I am definitely not the mythical high performing product designer that companies write their flashy buzzword filled job descriptions for anymore, and I am finally coming to terms with that reality after years of fighting it.
I am slow, I am completely non strategic, I am easily overwhelmed by Figma variants, and I just want to quietly collect my paycheque so I can go be a present happy parent in my real life away from the glowing screens.
If you think it’s fundamentally not okay, I don’t care.
If you also feel like you are somehow falling behind in a frantic race that you never actually consciously signed up for in the first place, because the race itself is largely an illusion, you ar with me.
You are entirely allowed to treat your daily job simply as a functional way to comfortably pay your bills, and you are completely allowed to loudly prioritise your mental peace and your family over mastering the latest design tool updates that will inevitably change again next month.
I genuinely hope you can find a quiet safe corner in this deeply chaotic and constantly shifting industry where your perfectly ordinary very human efforts are considered more than enough. I also sincerely hope you can grant yourself the much needed grace to finally stop chasing exhausting expectations that were never truly yours to begin with.
And if my mom reads this, know that your son has failed to be a designer that answers to industry demands. And maybe it’s okay, I am still your son, maybe with less opportunities and less salary.
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