Speaking as a designer, it’s important to separate the style/trend of a UI from its function. I think what you’re looking for is actually UX design.

As a discipline, User Experience uses evidence-based research to understand how and why users behave they do. This leads to specific design patterns and principles that underlie all the good UI design seen from the giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. It gives you the language to evaluate designs. This is the foundation of your UI and the rest is just style — fonts, colors, imagery and icons which is subjective and less important. I lost ambition to be a trendy UI designer, so every design looks the same, but usability will shines through. Clean, simple and accessible is timeless.

Study the articles from nngroup.com. They pretty much established the field of UX Design, with content talking about user behavior in the 1990s. https://lawsofux.com is a more attractive and consumable option, also heavily influenced by NN Group. Finally, accessible design is good design for all, not just those with disabilities. Understand the guidelines set by the W3C for accessibility, like minimum font sizes or contrast ratios for colors.

If others sing your praises, then you’re golden. To this day, I despise performance reviews and dread them every year and yet, every year they’re glowing reviews from my peers.

Being high-functioning often means you’re blind to your own contributions and more critical of your own work than others perceive. In time, I learned to accept the praise from others and blindly trust that things are ok even when every fiber of my being says I’m fucking up.

Sounds like you need validation more than anything. The points are bullshit if they don’t reflect the effort. Unfortunately, the corporate world is full of bullshit metrics to gauge productivity. I felt this at the bottom and nothing changed moving into “senior leadership”. It’s all bullshit and I encourage everyone to collect a paycheck and just go home.

I tell anyone entering the job market or is a young professional that absolutely no job is worth losing yourself over. Your skills change over time and will never leave you completely. I’m a competent designer, a reasonable developer but the most marketable skill that I didn’t actually develop until my late 20’s was soft skills—mostly developed by gently explaining to tech illiterate coworkers why what they wanted developed was impossible, impractical or just a bad idea.

I did this by treating every coworker as if they were the client. Be polite, professional and let them know that you want to solve their problems. It’s sounds stupid but people just put their guard down if you lead with, “I’m here to help you”. You can then have more honest conversation about all the bullshit keeping you from doing your job, provided it’s phrased as matter of fact and sprinkle in niceties.

The cruel irony is that this same disposition that started as a way to make me a more effective developer ended up pushing me into a position where I don’t get time to develop.

Over the 16 years since graduating, I learned that defining yourself by your career is often a trap. At least it doesn’t sound like you’re getting deep satisfaction from your work.

I burnt myself pretty bad going into the field thinking I was perusing a passion career and just kept getting kicked down for 5 years chasing a passion career until I found a work environment that paid decent and valued work/home life balance. In school I thought I’d never sell my soul, but now I’ve been working with the same people for a decade now and pretty happy about it, even with if the actual work is utterly boring.

Unless you’re a fortunate few that are truly passionate, driven, and lucky enough to land a career that fills your entire bucket, look for a job you can tolerate BUT with group of people that support you and your growth. In the end 2 years in is a drop in the bucket and you’ll see your career change directions over and over. You can always learn new skills or relearn them, so if this new job is something different to get you out of a slump, I say go for it. No one can answer for yourself but you.

Your body and mind is just a bag of chemical soup, undergoing a constant reaction. Your tangle of nerves and synapses feed a mess of neurons that are wired in a circuit that gives you that spark of consciousness. But none of this is a fixed system, and your body goes through constant change. As one neural pathway dies, another one is rewired and the circuitry is now different.

You can play the game of debating the Ship of Theseus, but who you “are” or “were” is just an illusion. Our memories are just the old circuits powering up, but even those change over time. Your memories are a false representation of the past because they only ever exist in the present and you’re at the mercy of your own perceptions.

You “are” until you are not. So do what feels good —Kiss your loved ones, hug a tree, and be kind to yourself and others while your bag of soup ain’t leaking.