This take's scorching, pal. Careful you don't sear your eyeballs just reading it. I've got a theory, and it's not gonna sit well with the cardigan crowd. Brace yourself.
Design, in its purest, most untamed form, is fundamentally incompatible with conservative thinking. Oil and water. Fire and holy scripture.
It gets worse. Conservative thinking? It's baked into the human brainpan. Hardwired like fear of snakes or distrust of clowns. Which means design—real design—the wild kind that tears down walls and paints the sky a different color, is always fighting upstream. It's a rebellion against our lizard-brain instincts. And here's how I figure it.
Conservatism, by its very nature, clings to the past like a drunk to his last cigarette. It's hardwired to protect the status quo; to maintain existing views, conditions, and institutions. That's not interpretation, that's the dictionary talking. To conserve is to not change. To freeze the moment. To hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the entire machinery of culture.
But design? Design is the lunatic in the lab smashing paradigms with a sledgehammer and screaming, "We can do better!" Design demands change. It thrives on the idea that nothing is sacred. Not your grandma's wallpaper, not your favorite sports team, not even the way you think about a door handle. As designers, we're in the business of evolution; of turning chaos into clarity and sometimes the other way around.
So here's the thing. If your brain is locked into conservative loops, if you're more interested in preserving than progressing, you're kneecapping your own potential to design anything worth a damn. Conservative thinking is the dead weight dragging the whole thing down. And the worst part? A lot of us don't even realize we're carrying it.
Here's a bitter pill wrapped in barbed wire. Nobody escapes this. Not me, not you, not even the acid-washed anarchist scribbling manifestos on the subway. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has conservative instincts lurking in the attic of their mind like dusty old boxes full of junk we refuse to throw out. It's baked into our DNA, a survival mechanism from a time when change meant saber-toothed tigers or eating the wrong berries and dying in a ditch.
Progress is brutal. Change doesn't show up wearing a clean shirt and asking nicely. No, it kicks the door in, knocks over your precious routines, and demands you think. And thinking; real, critical thinking, is exhausting. It's uncomfortable. It makes you question your habits, your opinions, maybe even your whole damn identity. No wonder we fight it. No wonder we build mental sandbags and call them "values."
Conservatism isn't just a political leaning, it's the path of least resistance. It's gravity for the mind. And unless you're actively swimming against it, you're sinking into it. That's the human default. Designers, dreamers, agitators; we have to claw our way out of that muck every single day, or we end up designing the same stale shit over and over again, thinking we're doing something new just because we changed the font.
The thing about designers is that we're not just okay with change. We live in it. We swim through it like fish in a stormy ocean, eyes wide, hearts thumping. But let's not kid ourselves. Everyone's got a threshold. You might be cool with a new grid system, but then you hear one idea; just one that hits too close to your mental home base, and suddenly your lizard-brain slams the brakes. You flinch. You snap. You say, "That's not how we do things." Boom. There it is. Conservatism, slipping in through the side door. You're no longer floating serenely through space. Now, you're careening back down to earth, burning as your re-enter the atmosphere.
And when the sky falls, when you get laid off, when the budget's gutted, when the client rips your guts out with a smile, change stops being a concept and becomes a monster. It's not always good. It's not always just. And it sure as hell isn't always progressive. Change can chew you up and spit you out into a darker place than where you started.
So what do we do? We push forward anyway. Not blindly, not recklessly, but with purpose. We design for the things we believe must be changed. We stay awake. We stay honest. We fail. We try again. Because that's the gig. That's the path.
You can only survive that kind of crucible if the work means something. Otherwise, you're just another cog in the corporate machine, shoveling pixels for a quarterly report while your soul quietly atrophies. That's why so many designers burn out. Not from the work itself, but from the sheer emptiness of it. Corporations don't care about meaning. They care about margin.
Many people think design is all color palettes and quirky office decor. Fun and games with a side of post-its. Sure, it's those things. But behind the curtain, it's also grit. It's anxiety. It's facing the existential dread of your own world-views every single day. If you're not willing to wrestle your inner conservatism to the ground and champion progress, then you're just decorating. Design is hard. Good design is war.