One of the most useful pieces of job advice I’ve ever received came from a manager early in my career.
His wife was a midwife. Whenever a deadline became overly dramatic or a creative disagreement started to feel like the end of the world, he’d remind us that she spent her days literally bringing life into the world.
Nobody here was doing that.
At the time, I laughed. But I’ve thought about that comment often over the years.
Before I became a designer, I wanted to be a social worker. Somewhere along the way, when the stress of my own adult life got harder, I realized I was drawn to a profession with lower stakes. Not lower effort. Lower stakes.
As it turns out, I became one of those women in SPAM. If you’re not on TikTok, that stands for Social Media, PR, Advertising, and Marketing: a catchall term for people who spend their days discussing content strategies, brand positioning, and whether a particular logo update lost its ‘soul’.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t matter.
Deadlines matter. Budgets matter. A missed delivery can cost real money. A celebrity might hate the photo you selected and call their publicist, who calls the network, who calls your boss. Entire teams can spend months building something only to watch it get rejected in a fifteen-minute meeting.
Those situations are totally stressful. But they’re still not emergencies.
One of the things I love most about being in a creative industry is that art isn’t math. Literally, I hate math. But I also love that there’s no single correct answer hiding in the back of the book.
Years ago, I heard rumors of an executive who hated purple. Not “preferred other colors” hated purple. Purple simply wasn’t allowed. If a design leaned even slightly violet, it was back to the drawing board.
A few years and a few organizational charts later, another executive arrived. He jokingly referred to himself as a “teenage girl at heart” and consistently gravitated toward pinks, purples, and neon.
The work hadn’t changed. The audience hadn’t changed. The only thing that changed was the person looking at it.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years because creative people spend an enormous amount of time searching for the right answer. Sometimes there is one. Sometimes there are several. And sometimes the answer depends entirely on who’s sitting in the room.
That’s part of what makes the work frustrating. It’s also part of what makes it interesting. Sometimes it’s okay to laugh at the absurdity. Because it is a little absurd.
We spend hours debating micro-expressions, color schemes, moodboards, whether a sky reads as threatening or aspirational… all in the hope that someone, somewhere, might pay attention. And sometimes they do.
Art can be meaningful. It can be moving. It can challenge assumptions, preserve history, create connection, or make someone feel understood. But it is still art.
Most of us are not fighting fires or performing open heart surgery.
We’re not delivering babies, we’re just arguing about the color purple.