The haptic buzz on Jae’s wrist is rhythmic now, a mechanical heartbeat that has nothing to do with his own pulse. It is 10:12 a.m. and his forearm is already beginning to ache, that dull, familiar thrum of a repetitive strain injury waiting to be diagnosed. He is staring at a spreadsheet that contains 422 rows of conflicting data, but he hasn’t actually looked at a cell in 22 minutes. Instead, his eyes are tracking the little red circles appearing on the Slack icon at the bottom of his screen like digital blisters.

One ping is a ‘quick favor’ regarding a client deck he didn’t write. Another is a request to ‘just take a peek’ at a broken Zapier automation because he’s the only one who remembers how the API calls were structured three years ago. By the time he finishes reading the third message-someone asking where the updated brand guidelines are kept, even though the link is pinned to the very channel they are typing in-Jae realizes he has once again become the human equivalent of a ‘ReadMe’ file.

The Curse of the Capable

I’ve spent a lot of time counting ceiling tiles lately. There are 222 in my current studio, if you count the partial ones near the HVAC vents. It’s a habit you pick up when you’re waiting for a fragrance to macerate, or when you’re waiting for your brain to stop vibrating from the sheer noise of other people’s lack of preparation. As a fragrance evaluator, my job is to find the soul in a bottle of chemicals, but mostly I find myself evaluating why the lab tech didn’t clean the beakers properly. It is the curse of the capable. We don’t just do our jobs; we do the 52 tiny invisible jobs that everyone else assumes just ‘happen.’

This is the quiet tragedy of modern work: the reward for being reliable is more work, but rarely the kind of work that matters. Organizations have developed a parasitic relationship with their most competent members. It starts innocently enough. You’re ‘the person who gets things done.’ You’re ‘the stabilizer.’ But soon, you aren’t an employee anymore; you’re an infrastructure project. You are the bridge that everyone else walks across to get to their own goals, and nobody stops to check if the bridge is cracking.

Jae’s laptop fans start to whir, a desperate sound like a jet engine trying to take off from a kitchen table. He’s reopening a workflow that a junior designer accidentally deleted. It will take him 32 minutes to fix, but he’ll tell them it took five because he doesn’t want to explain the complexity. That’s the competence tax. You pay it in time, but you also pay it in the erasure of your own effort. When you make difficult things look easy, people assume they are easy. They don’t see the 12 years of experience required to solve a problem in 12 seconds.

This pattern is how companies quietly convert skill into unpaid caretaking. The most reliable employees become informal tech support, emotional stabilizers, and translators of bad systems. If the CEO sends a vague, rambling email at 11:02 p.m., it’s the Jaes of the world who stay up until 1:02 a.m. translating it into actionable tasks for the team. They are the shock absorbers of the corporate vehicle. But shock absorbers wear out. They lose their bounce. They eventually just become metal hitting metal.

Competence-Induced Resentment

We talk a lot about ‘burnout,’ but we rarely talk about ‘competence-induced resentment.’ It’s the feeling of looking at your calendar and realizing that not a single minute belongs to you. Every block of time is a placeholder for someone else’s crisis. The irony is that the more you rescue the system, the less incentive the system has to fix itself. Why invest in better documentation when Jae is always there to answer the question? Why fix the broken software when Reese will just stay late and manually enter the data?

There is a deep sensory disconnect in these environments. In my world, we call it ‘olfactory fatigue.’ It’s what happens when you’re exposed to a smell for so long that your brain simply stops registering it. Offices have a similar fatigue regarding their top performers. They become so accustomed to the ‘scent’ of high performance-the lack of errors, the seamless pivots, the constant availability-that they stop noticing it altogether. They only notice when it’s gone. They only notice when the person finally breaks and leaves, leaving behind a 122-page vacuum that no one knows how to fill.

I’ve seen it happen in labs and I’ve seen it happen in boardrooms. A system that relies on individual heroics is not a system; it’s a hostage situation. We’ve glamorized the ‘hustle’ and the ‘fixer’ mentality, but we’ve ignored the fact that a truly well-designed environment should reduce the need for heroes. When we look at the logic of organizations like ems89, the focus shifts from finding more heroes to building better foundations. It’s about creating structures where the burden of clarity doesn’t fall on the same three people every single morning.

Jae finally closes the designer’s workflow. It’s fixed. He looks at his own to-do list. It has 22 items on it, and he hasn’t touched one. His coffee is cold, sitting in a mug that says ‘World’s Okayest Brother,’ a gift from a sister who actually sees him. He takes a sip and grimaces. It tastes like burnt beans and disappointment. He realizes he hasn’t stood up in 112 minutes.

The Loneliness of Functionality

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with being the ‘smart’ one in the room. It’s the loneliness of having no one to ask for help because everyone is too busy asking you. You become an island of functionality in a sea of confusion. And eventually, you start to wonder if you’re actually good at your job, or if you’ve just become really good at surviving other people’s mistakes.

We need to stop rewarding dependency. We need to stop equating ‘available’ with ‘valuable.’ If an employee has the most Slack messages, it shouldn’t be seen as a sign of leadership; it should be seen as a systemic failure. It means the information is trapped in a person instead of being accessible in a process. It means that person is drowning, and we’re all just standing on the shore asking them if they can please pass us a towel.

As I sit here, watching the dust motes dance in the light of the 22nd ceiling tile from the window, I realize that the only way out of the competence trap is to let things break. It is the hardest thing for a capable person to do. To see a mistake happening and to keep your hands in your pockets. To hear the Slack ping and leave it unanswered for more than 12 seconds. To allow the system to feel the friction of its own dysfunction.

The Pause

Jae reaches for his mouse. He hovers over the Slack icon. He pauses. He could answer the person asking about the brand guidelines. It would take him 2 seconds to find the link and paste it. But he thinks about his own 22 tasks. He thinks about his aching wrist. He thinks about the cold coffee.

He doesn’t click.

He closes his laptop. The room is suddenly quiet, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of a siren 2 blocks away. The world doesn’t end. The company doesn’t collapse. For the first time in 52 days, Jae takes a breath that belongs entirely to him. He wonders what else he’s been missing while he was busy being everyone else’s hero.

Letting Go is Growth

Maybe the most competent thing any of us can do is to stop being so damn useful.