Chapter 8: Obsolescence
by Mick McConnell
I’ve been called seasoned. Experienced. A mentor.
It’s a compliment.
It’s also code.
Code for: you’re not the future anymore.
This is what obsolescence actually feels like. Not a door slamming shut, but a quiet shift. Your name starts disappearing from the cc line. The brief goes to someone else. You’re still respected, but you’re no longer central.
And then comes the question that will haunt every creative who’s been doing this long enough:
Am I still useful—or just familiar?
I’ve crossed disciplines my whole career. Architecture. Branding. Startups. Agencies. Buildings. Digital. Physical. Leadership. I’ve never been “on trend,” but I’ve always stayed in motion. Not because I wanted attention—because I wanted to stay relevant. Not relevant in the public sense. Relevant to the work. Still sharp. Still useful.
But somewhere along the way, relevance got repackaged as visibility. As speed. As youth. And as that definition shifted, a lot of us—quietly, powerfully—got left out of the room.
We didn’t age out.
We were filtered out.
For being too slow. Too layered. Too honest.
The irony is, the more you’ve been through, the less the system knows what to do with you. You stop broadcasting. You get quieter. More efficient. You see through the games. You’ve shipped enough to know what won’t land. But that kind of clarity doesn’t look good in a pitch deck. So they stop asking. Until everything breaks—and then they call you.
That’s when you realize: you’re not obsolete.
You’re just inconvenient.
The people I trust most in this industry are the ones who’ve failed publicly. Who’ve burned out, built back, disappeared, returned. They’re not teaching trend reports. They’re teaching survival. They’re not selling process. They’re protecting it.
You can’t fake that. You have to live it. You have to carry wreckage and still build something honest. And when you do, when you make something that holds—it’s not just relevant. It’s rare.
So here’s where I landed:
If being visible means flattening everything I’ve learned just to fit the narrative, I’ll pass.
If being current means forgetting what works, I’m good.
If being relevant means performance over presence—count me out.
I’m still making.
Still listening.
Still building.
And no—I’m not obsolete.
I’m just not done yet.
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