Climbing the ladder can look like progress, yet quietly drain the spark that brought you into design. Here's how empathy helps you turn passion into purpose.
I read a post on Reddit the other day from an enterprise UX designer. They’d just landed a new gig with more money and a lead title that felt like a promotion. On paper, it sounded like progress. But the reality hit fast. Just patch-and-fix work. Migrating Excel sheets into out-of-the-box tools and calling it innovation.
What they wrote stayed with me:
“My design soul feels like it’s dying. No passion, no creative spark. I feel like I’m drifting further and further from what drew me into UI/UX in the first place.”
That feeling is more common than people admit, and it often hits right after you climb the ladder.
Most designers climb the career ladder for understandable reasons. You get promoted into a lead position or move from startups into enterprise UX. You gain a bigger title, more stability, better pay and benefits.
With that comes the promise of impact and influence.
The early days seem fine. You’re suddenly exposed to large programs and complex systems. You deal with new domains and teams spread across regions. You sit in strategy meetings. You meet senior leaders. The climb gives you a sense of elevation. It feels like the right choice. It feels like progress.
You tell yourself you’re finally doing meaningful work. You’ve earned a seat at the table.
But there’s a quiet trade-off most people don’t notice. Only when you’re far enough up that you start feeling down.
At first it’s the small things: more meetings, more alignment sessions and more approvals.
Your solution is defined by licensing agreements rather than user needs. Requests that are really just vendor configurations. Your influence shrinks even as your title grows. You feel the ceiling closing in.
The spark that pulled you into design—the curiosity, creativity and craft—starts to fade.
You still care. You still want to do great work. But the environment around you wants the result, not the process.
And then the questions arrive:
It’s not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that something’s happening to you.
And it has everything to do with scale.
Enterprises operate very differently from individuals driven by craft.
At scale, companies optimize for predictability, repeatability and risk reduction.
Not because leaders hate your creativity. Not because designers aren’t valued or design isn’t wanted.
But because reducing variance makes it easier for thousands of people to move in the same way. Your passion—your desire to shape and craft—doesn’t fit easily into that machine.
The mechanics of scale lack the sensitivity for meaning. It feels like you’ve lost your passion or miscalculated your career. It’s easy to see this as a personal failure.
But the truth is you didn’t change. The environment did. And the way out begins with seeing it differently.
When designers feel lost, we often forget the tool that built our discipline: empathy.
Empathy is what lets you step out of your own head and see the world through someone else’s eyes. It’s how you reinterpret your reality, how you can recalibrate your perspective.
Start with someone else’s frustrations—your users’.
Their frustrations and needs give you back a sense of clarity about why your work matters. Their perspective lets you see who you’re really doing this for.
That Excel sheet, migrated into a cloud-based dashboard, might not change your life. But it can change theirs.
Users remind you that you still make an impact, even when it feels like you can’t fully practice your craft.
Turning your empathy toward the business is less comfortable.
Understanding the business means acknowledging its constraints, priorities and pressures. It helps you see why innovation is slow, what the stakes are and what your boss is dealing with.
Empathy for the business doesn’t mean you capitulate. It lets you understand.
Understanding how the business works doesn’t fix everything, but it does reduce resentment. And resentment’s what holds you back.
When you see the system clearly, you stop interpreting constraints as personal attacks. You stop assuming incompetence. You recognize the environment around you.
And once you grasp that environment, you can design within it.
This is the hardest one.
Your own perspective is the one you can’t step away from. Your emotions are the ones you can’t ignore.
Self-empathy is more constructive than self-criticism. It makes you aware of your inner state.
And once you can see why you’re truly frustrated, you discover something greater than passion: purpose.
When you feel stuck, it’s tempting to think that “finding your passion” will fix everything. But passion alone won’t get you out.
The word pathos, the root in words like “empathy,” is about feeling and suffering—about what happens to you. It’s emotion.
And emotion comes from emovere: ex (out) + movere (move).
Emotion moves outward. It reacts. It signals. But emotion alone doesn’t move you forward. Purpose does.
Purpose comes from proponere—to put something forward. To place something ahead of you. To guide your next step.
Passion is what you feel in the moment. Purpose is what you do with that feeling.
And this is where empathy becomes a bridge. Empathy helps you look at the same reality and read it differently. It lets you recalibrate your perspective instead of staying locked in frustration. It shifts you from “how I feel” to “how I move.”
Once you understand the people you impact, the business you operate in and the reason you feel stuck, you have the first pieces of the puzzle that uncover your purpose.
Purpose isn’t a statement. It’s what moves you forward.
And once you see it, you can redesign your job, your role and your path. Even within constraints, you can bring that purpose forward.
Early in my career, I saw the path the same way everyone else did: a ladder.
Later, when I was leading others on their path, I learned to nuance the direction. Not everybody thrives on an upward trajectory. Some are better off moving sideways. So I tailored progress and growth to the individual—vertical and lateral progressions.
But here’s the truth I learned far too late: Up, down, left or right don’t automatically mean forward.
I redesigned my career multiple times. Carved out new roles inside the same company. For years, it worked. Until it didn’t. My reality was defined by the mechanics of scale. I found myself stuck in the valley of despair.
So I left. No new job lined up. No master plan. Just space.
And in that space, I finally had enough room to look inward. To understand what I needed to do. To renew my perspective.
I rediscovered where I could move on purpose. I’m still defining that purpose. It’s still taking shape.
My career’s no longer about moving up. It’s about moving forward.
Not how I feel about what I do, but how I move with what I have to do.
That’s what progress is about: not just finding passion, but moving on purpose.
Teon Beijl is a business designer with over a decade of experience in enterprise software for the oil and gas industry.
Formerly Global Design Lead for reservoir modeling, remote operations and optimization software at Baker Hughes, he now helps people who feel stuck through his own business, Unpuzzler. Teon works with leaders on business design and with professionals on career design, leveraging his experience as both designer and leader to help people create clarity and live on purpose—by design. Connect with Teon on LinkedIn or Substack.