Writing about this is difficult; I can’t pretend it isn’t. Studying Csíkszentmihályi’s book “Creativity” alongside Newport’s “Deep Work” has sort of answered a question I’ve had since at least 2019: Why aren’t there more graphic design students on Tumblr? And now I realize that this question is just a version of the more obvious question: Why aren’t professional graphic designers more active on social media? And I think I understand now why. I am reading these two books to reconnect with the deep satisfaction I felt working on my bachelor’s thesis, which was difficult for two reasons: it was heavily theoretical, and there was very little time left to write the thesis. And somewhere along the way, I started to realize something about social media—two answers to my questions. Professionals simply don’t use it that much to talk shop. Unless what they talk about sells a product. Social media is marketing. That is easy enough for me to accept. The second answer is more difficult for me to accept: professional graphic designers are not more active on social media because neither their (deep) work nor their study is a good fit for social media. By and large, they are simply too busy doing the actual work to be interested in writing about it on social media, worst of all, maybe even on some sort of schedule. Professionals, in short, are either out of the office or available for business. And I think that is also why most professionals are hard to reach and come by, why so many of them become seemingly absent from media: they are deeply involved in their work. And I feel that this is a fair price to pay for professionalism, for flow states, for deep work, for becoming so good they can’t ignore you. I, for one, still struggle with doing something without then telling someone about it, be that a person or on social media, and this series of posts I’ve been doing lately illustrates this issue quite well. Of course, I can tell myself that I want someone to be inspired by what I write here, but that is not really the truth. The truth is that I have accepted the social programming of social media to such a degree that I’ve started finding it difficult to simply do what I do and do what I want to do for the sake of doing it. I am a temporarily inconvenienced influencer, just 99,930 followers short of 100k, on average. And by knowing that about myself and telling you about it, I am forcing myself to accept the deal to turn pro, instead of turning myself into an influencer whose racket is graphic design or into a person who can’t focus on work. I don’t know where that leaves my social media accounts. And for right now, it doesn’t need to be addressed or solved. If you ask me, go out and find these two books and read them. That is all I can say right now. I don’t even know if this post makes sense. I’ll have someone look it over without touching its Flesch-Kincaid score and then read through it a few more times. How can you write about something when the central point is that publishing it is an issue?

Impostor syndrome is just a poser’s guilty conscience, you know?

Source: My after‑hours blog on Tumblr Code & Canvas