Every morning I put on my professional face like armor, smiling at meetings where we discussed strategies I morally opposed, nodding at decisions that contradicted everything I believed about how people should be treated, speaking words that sounded like they came from someone else’s mouth. By evening, I was exhausted not from hard work but from the constant labor of pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
The soul tax is brutal and compounding. Working against your values doesn’t just drain your energy—it splits your identity, forcing you to maintain two versions of yourself: the person you are and the person your paycheck requires you to be. This internal division creates a exhaustion that sleep cannot cure because it stems not from physical fatigue but from spiritual fracture.
I was well-compensated for work that made me feel worthless, professionally successful at being personally unsuccessful, climbing a ladder that led to a destination I didn’t want to reach. The cognitive dissonance was crushing: spending eight hours a day contradicting my convictions, then wondering why I felt empty when I came home.
The company valued efficiency over humanity, profit over people, growth over sustainability. I valued kindness, authenticity, meaning. Every day became a performance where I acted like someone who shared their priorities while privately mourning the compromises I was making just to keep the job that was supposed to fund the life I wanted to live.
But values aren’t just preferences—they’re the foundation of identity. When you work against them consistently, you don’t just feel tired; you feel lost. You start questioning whether you actually believe what you thought you believed, whether integrity is affordable, whether principles are luxuries for people who don’t need steady paychecks.
The exhaustion comes from carrying the weight of daily betrayal—not dramatic betrayal, but the small, constant betrayals of staying silent when you should speak up, going along when you should object, implementing decisions you think are wrong because resistance feels too risky.
Maybe the most expensive things we pay for aren’t bought with money but with compromise, not charged to credit cards but to character, not deducted from bank accounts but from the bank of who we believe ourselves to be.
