Why do designers dream of becoming baristas (or chefs)?
Disclaimer: this is in no way scientific. It’s just a theory. Don’t base your career decisions on it 😊
I’ve been having a lot of Plan B chats with friends and colleagues from the tech industry recently. Might be due to the state of our industry, burnout, boredom / boreout, economic climate etc. but it seems that more and more people are dreaming about leaving tech and going for greener pastures. Sometimes literally, as some peeps yearn to become organic farmers or shepherds. Besides those - more exotic - escape plans and the usual barista or chef path, I’ve heard about designers wanting to operate a bed and breakfast and developers thinking of dropping coding and becoming yoga instructors.
I’ve also had daydreams myself. Mine included opening a small restaurant (it even has a name — Chefski), all day breakfast place (and the MVP version of it — an oatmeal cart), building productivity tools (tried and failed building a tool called Circles one time but haven’t given up on the idea still), plus a couple of book ideas. I don’t want to bore you with the rest, these are just for illustration and to say that there is absolutely 0 judgement from me for this phenomenon.
Brining it back to the question: why are we having these daydreams?
Surely it isn’t for more money. Some of these ideas pay much much less than what we currently make as a salary in the tech industry. It seems like a foolish move to pursue a path like this.
I have a theory and it’s based on what we miss in our work lives:
- We miss simplicity. Tech in general and design in particular can be soooo complex sometimes. Workload is high, and barriers to work can be higher. Getting things done — sometimes even the smallest ones — can be weeks or months of work.
- We miss achieving true mastery. Having the highest level of effortless mastery (or the feeling of it) is quite hard to achieve in a ever changing tool and tech landscape. You cannot perfect a skill with the skillset always being in flux.
- We miss interacting with new people. You don’t pick your family and you don’t pick your colleagues (unless you are a hiring manager). Contact with new people outside of those two circles is limited. Some of the daydreams enable constant interactions with new and interesting people.
- We miss being immersed in something by ourselves. Sometimes it’s not the need for more interactions, it’s a daydream of less interaction — just you and the puff pastry. The puff pastry holds no grudges.
- We miss being in the flow. In that beautiful state, time can pass so quickly that you don’t have a second to think about anything else other than the craft and the product you love to produce. No anxiety, no boredom, no stress.
- We dread politics. Small business means no complex organisational chart, no cross departmental dependencies and less fights for promotion.
- We hate wasted effort. We might work on a project for months and the project can end up either failing flat or being stopped.
- We miss making someone happy every day. We love solving problems but have we really solved a problem as big as feeding someone that is hungry and to do that with the best meal and dining experience of their life? Maybe. But not every day.
- We miss disconnecting after work. Pastry chefs don’t feel the pull to check Slack after hours. They probably don’t know what Slack (the tool) actually is.
- We need a break. It can be that we only need a vacation or a sabbatical. Sometimes, we need distance even from the things we love. This way we can appreciate them more when we come back to them. We also miss not having the pressure to continually stretch. Coffee is pretty much coffee. Not to downplay the challenges of being a barista but the latest innovation can be adding a extra shot or foaming the latest plant milk. Or doing my least favourite coffee art — the swan. Compare that with building a Figma prototype with variables? Give me a break!
- We miss working with our hands and directly control the output. Oftentimes we are very much removed from what we create. Either by proximity from the development or due to the time lag of when something is designed and when is it put live.
- We miss creating something that we love consuming ourselves. Some of us work for products and in industries where we are not the end user and even on projects that clash with our principles. No judgement here, we all need to make a living, not everyone has the luxury of choice!
- We miss being entrepreneurial. We like the feeling of being free and being our own boss. A daydream close to our current design realities is to become a freelancer or to open a agency to satisfy that itch.
And one more (a bit deeper one):
14. We want to be somebody else. It can be tiring and boring when you are the same person for 30+ years. I see my son and I envy him a bit. He’s an imaginary pilot one day, a professor another, a race card driver for the weekend… there is never a dull day. He can just switch professions! Must be good to live like that. Us, grown up designers, can only dream. Unless we have the courage and grit to actually change. I don’t (at least not yet), I still have to learn a lot from my son. Also, I still LOVE design. I will try to find the things I miss while doing the thing I fell in love with in the first place.
Before you go…
Most of the cravings mentioned above can be satisfied in our current jobs to a certain degree. It starts with identifying what we miss and making an effort to improve our context and ourselves. Not to say that it’s easy but it’s possible.
May you find what you’ve been missing and looking for, either in your work or in your daydream. Just make sure you get me a coffee on the house if the daydream works out.