Conversations About Creativity Under Capitalism
A stylised image of Early alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν ("The All is One") from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist in MS Marciana gr. Z. 299. (10th century) (Source: Wikimedia)
This began, as many things do now, with tired conversations sent in texts between friends who happen to work in the creative industries.
We were floating in the same current: oversaturated timelines, aesthetic trends mutating every other week, and the constant, dull ache of needing to stay relevant. We weren’t trying to solve anything. We were just talking. But beneath the memes and tangents, something real emerged: a shared exhaustion. A desire for breath. A question of whether creativity can survive the system it’s been folded into.
This light, conversational essay is a thread pulled from those exchanges. I don’t know how many parts I’ll manage to write down, but let’s say that this is a work-in-progress, as we might usually say at work.
Note: Conversations have been translated and heavily edited for clarity. My friends’ names are under pseudonyms, or I’d rather say cute emojis!
Burnout, Again
🟣: I’ve been that burned out lately.
CN: Honestly, I feel like the structure of the graphic design industry is holding the whole discipline back.
There's barely any room for research or even proper documentation.
🟣: Even Pak ••• and Pak ••• have mentioned that too.
CN: Exactly.
I got this research book in Madrid, and the author literally admits how difficult it is to do research while also being a working designer.
No time, no energy.
Makes me want to write something, but then again… where do I even start?
Everyone Wants Everything Now
🐵: Lately in animation, it feels like everything has to be animated just to be considered valuable. It’s not about storytelling or purpose anymore. it’s like, “Just throw in some animation so we don’t fall behind.” So portfolios can look current.
It’s a bit like when Spider-Verse dropped and suddenly everyone wanted that look. As if mimicking the trend could make their work go viral too.
There’s a rush to produce something eye-catching, something that fits whatever’s trending, just so people don’t feel left out of the hype. But it makes me wonder… What are we actually chasing? Is it attention? Relevance? Profit?
CN: Graphic design is no different. The rise of minimalism, for example, didn’t come purely from artistic decisions. It was tied to production logic. Businesses needed faster output, so designers were asked to work within simplified systems. Minimalism, or what’s now mocked as “Corporate Memphis,” wasn’t just a style. It was a solution to a business problem.
Design became about speed and scale. Less about intention, more about deliverables. Fewer questions, more slides. And so it spread.
When Everything Is “Effortless”
🐵: You know, I’ve noticed similar patterns in music too.
There was a time when electronic music blew up. EDM with almost no lyrics, just beats. That shift felt like a reaction to earlier decades when singers had to hit insane notes and songs had complex melodies. Like, who can top Whitney or Mariah?
Maybe that minimalist sound was a kind of escape. Something simpler. But it got overused. Eventually people started missing meaning. Songs with soul. And now, it feels like we’re circling back to that.
CN: Right. That simplification always begins as a break. It’s an intentional move away from noise, from excess. But when it becomes a mass formula, the soul gets stripped out. Minimalism as expression becomes minimalism as default.
And the scary thing is, the market loves it like that. Because it’s fast. Because it’s replicable. Because it doesn’t slow the machine.
But creativity isn’t made to be efficient. It isn’t supposed to be optimised.
Design in the Age of Deadlines
CN: I keep coming back to this question: I don’t like capitalism, but I need money to eat.
So how do we balance design—as—a—survival—tool with design as something we actually love?
🟣: But isn't graphic design itself born out of capitalism? Didn’t it start with printing, commerce?
CN: Yup. Industrial revolution, typesetting.
The whole system was built to sell. Graphic design is capitalism’s child.
🟣: And religion too, right? With the Bible being mass-printed?
CN: True.
But I’m more curious about what it means now—can designers still take charge of their own decision-making?
Especially in contexts like our country.
🟣: I remember my compendium project. The idea was to “trust the user”, because design thinking teaches that.
But… what if the user’s not an expert?
CN: Then the outcome suffers?
🟣: Right?
Designing with the user is one thing, but following them all the way... sometimes the result is just confusing.
Shouldn't the sweet spot be empathy and prototyping, not full handover?
CN: Oh well... this reminds me why design often feels overwhelming.
So many inputs. So many constraints.
Soul for Sale
🐵: It’s like this constant pressure to generate. Every day, more output. In animation, clients now expect you to function like an algorithm: the more content you push, the more they think it’ll help engagement. There’s no time to breathe, to experiment, to ask, What’s possible?
CN: Exactly. People assume creatives can just pop out new ideas endlessly, but that’s not how it works. We need slowness, silence, wandering. That’s where ideas come from.
But under capitalism, we’re not allowed that space. And it shows. You get 3D modellers who don’t notice objects. Animators who don’t study movement. Designers who never get to look at something long enough to ask, What else could this be?
And I don’t think it’s laziness. It’s exhaustion. Burnout disguised as apathy.
🐵: Totally. And when you’re surrounded by that pace, it gets internalised. You start to feel guilty for not being productive all the time.
So artists end up selling their rhythm. Their breath. Their soul, really.
CN: Because we need to eat. And the machine offers money in exchange for time, attention, identity.
🐵: A lot of new creatives are shaped inside this system. No time to explore their voice, no time to reflect. Just content, content, content.
It’s not that they don’t care—it’s that they’ve never been given the space to find out what they care about.
Breathing Room
CN: When I teach, I always tell students: there are other ways to do design. Client work isn’t the only future.
Design activism matters. So does personal exploration. It’s okay to take time. To be uncertain. To let something brew before it’s shared.
Honestly, what design needs right now is breath. Not more tutorials or productivity hacks, but space to think. To feel. To pause without guilt.
🐵: Yes. Like, in most professions, you’re allowed to have off-days. Why is it that in creative work, we’re expected to be at 100% all the time? That’s just... unrealistic.
CN: And social media doesn’t help. It’s frustrating to see thoughtful work get buried under algorithmic nonsense.
Someone can pour their heart into a design, but if the platform doesn’t favour it, it disappears. And meanwhile, something generic goes viral.
🐵: Exactly! That disconnect is exhausting. It makes you wonder: who are we really making things for? The audience? Ourselves? Or a system that doesn't even know what it wants?
Ouroboros
🟣: Pak ••• posted something about AI recently. Like, what happens in a few years if all art is AI-generated?
Sure, writing prompts seems creative… But what if the next generation grows up only knowing AI art?
CN: That’s terrifying.
Prompts rely on real inspiration. Things we’ve seen, felt, touched.
🟣: Exactly. If you're only exposed to AI-generated visuals… what does “originality” even mean?
CN: Can AI even understand the kind of vague, floaty, half-formed image in your head?
🟣: Or what if it already can?
Like… what if it can reverse-engineer a prompt just from an image?
CN: And then use that prompt to generate another image?
🟣: A generative machine, prompting itself.
A closed loop.
CN: It’s not even remix anymore. It’s recursion.
Generative AI feeding itself its own leftovers.
🟣: Honestly... kind of funny. But also terrifying.
CN: I saw an Instagram reel that said AI language is already deteriorating, because the inputs are getting worse.
We’re training machines on junk.
🟣: Like it’s eating its own tail.
An ouroboros of templates and prompts.
CN: Sounds like a dystopian world we live in now.
By the end of our conversation, we were both too tired to keep going. One of us fell asleep before 10. One reluctantly went back to work. The other scrolled through cat memes to decompress. But maybe that’s where the real protest lives. Not in grand statements, but in quiet refusals. In carving out time to talk. To feel disoriented. To wonder aloud. In the decision to pause when the world says go faster.