Within the last year my entire network of meaning professionals has evaporated.

Everyone in the meaning business is in exile, either unemployed or employed in pure systems work, constructing and repairing functional systems.

People feel a loss of something, but, because they are unequipped with concepts and language to explain or even describe it, they just feel bad, impotent hollowness. Things feel joyless, purposeless and no longer worth the trouble. Maybe it might be better if it all sort of comes apart and goes away.

My own organization has gone down the same vortex. Leadership insists — desperately, almost frantically with depression-damped compression — that what we do is still design. The only reason they can half believe themselves is that they have become so hollowed out and so oblivious to what design essentially is and does that every point of comparison is dead to them, pure null void, nothing. Younger professionals see little difference between now and whenever, because they were raised in systemic nihilism, taught nothing of the past, and never knew design in the first place, while somehow knowing everything.

I have invested years learning not only how to do design, but how to think and say what design essentially is.

This idle philosophizing I do every day, starting before sunrise, when everyone slumbers, has equipped me to remember while everyone around me forgets and then forgets their forgetting in a dark waking dream where there is nothing to remember.

Design — like so many crucially important things — is fragile, easily lost and, once lost, difficult to recover.

My new job is to remember.