A friend of mine is training to be a Jungian psychologist. She’s practiced her therapeutic chops on me twice now, and she’s very talented. She’s sort of become my confessor. For the last week I’ve been reading Fritz Perls, and I was inspired by this to make a confession:

I think what makes design so painful now is what I used to love most about it. Design, at its best, renegotiates the social.

When the social was renegotiable, that was a real joy.

But for our younger generations, the social is now sacred turf, and nonnegotiable.

Society with the young is rigidly dogmatic, stilted, and phony, shot through with pious incuriosity, ethical fixations and taboos. Its that damn ideology in which every last one of them is indoctrinated. It is all they know. Anything outside it paralyzes their minds and seems to them just morally-suspicious nonsense.

All this makes it impossible to do the kind of design work that gives my life meaning. Morally-suspicious nonsense is where the inspiration is buried!

In times like these, it seems, no meaning is possible outside one-on-one dialogue.

And it seems dialogue may only be possible in a clinical setting.

Maybe I should just crawl off and be a psychologist.