What will become of us?
Keeping yourself relevant…
As I multitask through the entire Adobe suite, on my trusty MacBook Pro struggling under the weight of such behemoths, working through specs for our upcoming food startup, and trying to keep my clients and their impossible deadlines in place, I keep getting a recurring thought in my head, a thought that will not go away.
You see, I once thought that going to university would solve all my problems, make me rich while working on my ideal job, to follow my passion I stubbornly hurt a lot of people in the process, I had forced myself to waste five years on a course that probably did little to nothing towards my career path. How naïve of me!
Five years is not a long time, but it was enough for me to learn about interfaces and designing them in exchange for cash during university, mostly to keep banks and landlords happy. Five years were just enough to confirm that what I have been doing on the side has not been entirely wasted.
As the years pass by, I keep thinking of how lucky I am to work with these amazing and talented people from around the world, or alternatively, how unlucky I was to find yet another client worth of a mention on Clients From Hell, when all I know about design today has been self-taught.
— But the thought of “what’s next?” keeps popping up from time to time: that fear of a sudden change in the way we design digital products or that somehow I would lose all my skills, reputation and clients is something that keeps me anxious, it has been there from day one, on the back of mind, showing its ugly face during the low periods of my life.
Do you ever think of your future as a digital designer? What will happen to us when in 5, 10, 20 years we become middle-aged men and women? Will we have a lot of passion and understanding about this field to keep us interested and profitable, while sitting through yet another WWDC video, projecting an aged Jony Ive in the middle of our living room, watching our grandkids roam around the house in hovering scooters? Would we have the patience to listen to that client who, yet again, holograms us at 11pm about the colour of that darned button? Or battling our ways in Photoshop CC 2034, designing gamification badges, that will appear in that new social app our new client is so eager to monetise from once launched on the App Store for next Apple iHolo device?
This fear of becoming irrelevant is hindering my process, I am ever so cynical about the nth “let’s work on a new groundbreaking social network app” email hitting my inbox, that I keep thinking about learning new skills, anything applicable in the real world, maybe I should work my way up a banking system, bankers make a lot of money, don’t they? Or go back to university for 8 years to become a doctor, change real lives, not secluding people via social apps. Or maybe I should learn a real men’s skill, become a carpenter, or a mechanic, no, maybe a farmer. But will my feeble, designer’s body keep up with these physically demanding jobs?
Maybe I will be here, working through these interfaces, sipping matcha, worrying that my client might love me so much that he has already setup the 5th call of the day, while swearing at my screen because everything is running so slow thanks to the 5 Adobe applications I have running simultaneously, being thankful of what I do and writing my first blog post of my life, I love my job.
