When I wrote Pressing Pause, I was not saying goodbye to design. I was trying to understand what had happened to the profession around me—and what had happened to me within it.

For more than two decades, each professional move I made carried me forward. New responsibilities. New challenges. New opportunities. And, yes, a larger paycheck.

Then came the first move that sent me sharply in the other direction.

I now earn roughly half of what I earned not very long ago. I am not motivated solely by money, and I never have been. But there is no honest way to pretend that such a severe reduction does not hurt.

It hurts the financial health of my family. It changes what feels possible. It places new limits around ordinary decisions that once required far less thought.

And, perhaps just as painfully, it checks the ego.

I know that a salary is not a complete measure of a person’s worth. I know that employment circumstances are not a complete measure of talent. I know, intellectually, that I did what I needed to do: I found work, accepted change, and kept moving.

Still, there are small but significant moments when I feel as though I let myself down. Worse, there are moments when I worry that I let my family down.

I know I should not feel that way.

Yet knowing and feeling are not always the same thing.

The hardest part of professional displacement is not always losing the work. Sometimes it is losing the version of yourself that the work once seemed to confirm.

My own job loss did not come from one clean, easily explained cause. Some of it involved artificial intelligence and emerging technology. Some involved age and the assumptions that can accompany experience. Some involved personality and conflict. Some involved an organization that did not appear entirely certain what it wanted or where it intended to go.

Most professional endings are probably less tidy than the explanations later assigned to them.

But my experience also sits within something larger.

Across the design industry, talented people are being pushed aside while organizations pursue speed, flexibility, and reduced cost. Teams shrink. Roles expand. Timelines compress. One person is expected to absorb research, strategy, UX, UI, visual design, content, accessibility, analytics, front-end development, and now AI-assisted production.

The role has not simply evolved.

It has accumulated.

And when everything becomes urgent, experience can be misunderstood as expense. Deliberation can be mistaken for slowness. The person asking whether the team is solving the right problem may appear less agile than the person willing to produce an answer immediately.

That does not mean the faster answer is the better one.

It means speed is easier to measure.

For years, designers were encouraged to advocate for empathy, accessibility, discovery, and thoughtful problem-solving. Those values remain sound. Yet many organizations now provide less time, fewer people, and smaller budgets with which to practice them.

Technology did not make curiosity obsolete.

But business decisions can make curiosity inconvenient.

I do not believe design is dying. I do believe the rules have changed. The profession is being reorganized around tools, production speed, and economic pressure. Some extraordinary talent will adapt within that environment. Some will move elsewhere. Some will carry their skills into places that do not use the word design at all.

None of that means the talent disappeared.

Sometimes the market simply stopped rewarding it in the same way.

That distinction matters—especially to those of us learning how to separate our value from the title, salary, and professional structure that once reflected it back to us.