La Fleur Qu’on Appelle Souci



  1. Introduction
  2. Part One:  On Capitalism and Schizophrenia
  3. Part Two: On Random Image Generators
  4. Part Three: On Perpetual Stew
  5. Part Four: On Human-Centered Design
  6. Part Five: On the “College of Design High School”
  7. Part Six: On Aimlessness
  8. Part Seven: On Finding Inspiration



















P001 →  On Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“What if I never make it back from this dumb panic attack? (What if I don’t?)”
-Bladee, YUNG SHERMAN (ft. Yung Sherman)


If your eyes look like this... you need to go home immediately and get some sleep.


The number one thing I’ve learned about going crazy is that you have zero perception of your own delusion.

In early November 2024 I had what my doctors and psychologists labeled a psychotic episode. No one thinks they could go crazy until they are crazy, and all the sudden, you’re so far gone you can’t see what has happened. I felt as if I had a new level of clarity; I could see myself in a new light I had never seen before, yet this clarity in reality was layers upon layers of mental health issues that compounded over years of toxic work habits.

This was a deeply disturbing experience, and if you want to know more or have experienced something similar or need advice, don’t hesitate to contact me. The experience of psychosis is so unlike anything else; the only people who truly understand are those who have had it and come back into reality.

I’m not writing this to give you a timeline of everything that happened. I want to dive into the context of why this happens to people (in a universal sense) and why this happens to designers.


McKenzie Wark is one of the most dynamic philosophers on the scene. From her intellectual works like Capital is Dead, to her recently published work that is Bushwich in a nutshell (On Raving), I’m obsessed with everything she puts out into this world. She has a concept of the “hacker” class that I’ve personally developed an attachment to, as it seems to describe almost perfectly how graphic designers fit into our current mode of production. (If you like philosophy, yes, this is related to Technofeudalism, and yes, I believe in it. I’m sorry… there's a reason I avoided using the word capitalism there.)

Wark describes the hacker class in saying,  “Where the farmer grows crops through a seasonal cycle and the worker stamps out repetitive units of commodities, the hacker has to use their time in a different way, to turn the same old information into new. Getting this done is not like the seasonal repetitions of farming or the clocking-on of the worker. It happens when it happens, including time spent napping or pulling all-nighters. The workplace nightmare of the worker is having to make the same thing, over and over, against the pressure of the clock; the workplace nightmare of the hacker is to produce different things, over and over, against the pressure of the clock.” (Capital is Dead, 2019)

Is that not the nightmare of being a designer?

Design is descending into randomness, disorder, and chaos as the search for truth and meaning becomes increasingly disorienting. In a world that can only be described with a chain of suffixes and add-ons (post-post-modern, late-stage capitalism, etc), design feels spoken for. Everything that needs to exist has been ideated, tested, created, re-designed, and thrown away. We have a desire to produce difference out of sameness, to provide enough novelty in our ideas to each be individually marketable enough to get a job, yet this feels futile when we are each so small.

It is this disorientation that Deleuze and Guatarri refer to as schizophrenia under capitalism. And while they don’t use that term in a clinical sense, it is no coincidence that 6 months after writing the paragraph you just read (originally written for my design manifesto, Design as Collective Love), I would myself be experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. While these conditions affect us all, we designers bear the burden of novelty. It is this heavy creative responsibility that leads us towards insanity, and it is what I credit for the root of my own mental health distortions.

I am not saying that we are helpless to the throws of our entropy-filled world. Rather, as designers, we train our design processes mentally, processes set over years and years of workflow that become programmed into us.


I chose a path of late studio nights, equating my self-worth to my design production, and a secret level of self-comparison and competition that was completely unnecessary. So, while I advise you to avoid all of these habits, I’ve crafted some general tips for how to give yourself peace.

A recipe for avoiding
a psychotic episode
  1. Get 8 hours of sleep a night
  2. Get LinkedIn as a freshman and ease into accepting your fate as part of the American capitalist machine over all 4 years
  3. Avoid energy drinks at all costs
  4. Don’t do schoolwork after 7 PM on weekdays
  5. Surround yourself with people that have work / life balance
  6. Never work the Saturday-Sunday Brunch Clopen (SSBC… I think this is what did me under, genuinely)
  7. Keep your childhood hobbies
  8. Learn a language
  9. Journal, talk to friends, have a therapist if you can afford it