Read TIme – 6 min

Wandering Time – ∞

Hey, I am writing here to share an observation, specifically for our creative community and more specifically for the people in the community who are actually creating.

Not managing or not coming up ideas, but creating.

I don’t think its the work culture and how it comes to us, but more of how we react to it or how we are very naturally conditioned to react to it.

See, us designers are the people who are very close to the universe or the flow of the universe. What is this universe and flow? It helps us day-dream, live in fantasies, be at bliss.

We borrow that power of universe, sometimes and through that we create, we make shapes. And when those shapes come together, we just cannot stop looking at the gem we made.

Staying up all night to be able to make my own Portfolio website? I would keep opening that website the next day multiple times to feel good over the gem I created.

Such gem we create, they shine so bright that we are not able to see anything past that shine. It brings us tremendous joy to be able to create those gems and only more when we look at what came out or what became. And that itself brings us enough happiness to be satisfied.

I have trained my doggy into behaving, like waiting for the food to eat, until asked to. Not pick any food from the table. saying hello, jumping, barking at will and more importantly not to bite. Every time she does the things I want her to do, she gets a treat. She sometime gets irritated by this, but she still does it for the treat. It’s a reward system that has been developed by us for animals, mammals or anything, I don’t know.

Its the same reward system that works for designers in the same way. We make something, it brings tremendous joy to us, brings happiness and we are satisfied the next day. It doesn’t matter, if we pulled an all nighter to get that done, it doesn’t matter if we forgot to eat all day. It doesn’t matter if we stood up from our workstation just to stretch. It doesn’t matter if we are immensely stressed about the timeline. As long as we create something and get to see it, we are satisfied.

This reward system that we have developed for ourselves has ruined us in the living world. It is amazing for soul replenishment, but in the living world, it has ruined us or is ruining us. Without the knowledge of this system working for us or against us, we step into the professional world, we get to some senior positions, leadership positions. Thinking its fun, we work for long hours, without eating sometimes, without working on real world skills, and gradually we become disoriented. Our soul is not aligned on what it wants, what it needs. Our body does not know what it wants, what it needs. Our sleep cycle or circadian rhythm is haywire by now and funnily enough, we still feel that we are enjoying the things we do.

At this time, we are at leadership or senior positions and we says things like, ‘its hectic but its enjoyable’, ‘we pulled an all nighter one day before Diwali for work, but next day its chill’. By this time, they or we fail to recognise the mental atrocities we are doing to ourselves.

And we talk about these same atrocities like it’s normal to the young or fresh designers that come to us. And they having no idea what to take in, make this general worldview of creative industry, and that’s where this rotten system seeps into other people’s lives. We also tend to feel that ‘we’ are important at the workplace. Here I have to say, that it is not us who is seen important, it is the fact that we are very close to the flow of universe and this body has the capacity to externalise that flow and make gems out it. Those gem brings monetary value or fame or whatever to the people who see us as important.

That is what is seen important by these soul sucking people. And when people around us see that as an important thing, we are already labelled as good machines. The more sad part is, by this time we ourselves don’t see us as humans. If we have agreed and started to believe that our talents are important in a workplace, we ourselves have objectified us into machines and not humans. We ourselves have rejected ourselves.

We have failed to love this external body. We have failed to love our soul. We have failed to love ourselves. It seems very harsh for me to say this, but we have also failed to love the living and non-living around us.

And to that I say very sadly and hurtfully. We are not machines, we are humans.