by Sonny Garg, author of “Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough“
For a long time I would have told you I was a values-driven leader, and I had the speeches to prove it. I talked about dignity, about people-first cultures, about leading with heart. And for years, inside a corporate culture that ran significantly on intimidation, I kept my head down while people around me were harassed and diminished, because my career was going well and silence turned out to be part of the price.
I want to name this willful ignorance and inaction precisely because it is the part I did not understand while it was happening. To stay silent about what was being done to people, I had to quietly downgrade those people in my own mind, and dehumanizing has a gentle corporate vocabulary: not my lane, above my pay grade, a complicated situation. My silence did not make me a bystander to that machinery. It made me a component of it, and I have stopped constructing sentences that suggest otherwise. Meanwhile, years of relentless cost-cutting and layoffs required a second adaptation. I built armor around whatever part of me registered other people’s pain, because registering it fully would have made my job unbearable. Both adaptations worked, the way successful adaptations always work: invisibly, and at compound interest.
The Price of Silence
Here is what nobody told me about the armor: it has no off switch, and it does not stay at the office. The self that could sit through hard meetings without flinching came home and sat at my dinner table. I had less access to all of my feelings, not just the inconvenient ones. It turns out you cannot selectively numb. I had accepted a discount on the feelings that made my job difficult, and the same discount was applied to everything and everyone I loved.
Why did I pay it? The honest answer implicates me more than the culture does. The environment was feeding something in me that wanted feeding: advancement, recognition, wealth, the next rung of a ladder I had been climbing since graduating from college. The moral tolls were folded quietly into the price, and I paid them the way most of us do. Almost nobody sells their integrity in one dramatic transaction. We lease it out in small automatic payments and lose track of the total.
Are You Willing to Carry the Cost?
So, three questions, offered by someone still working through his own answers. First: what have you trained yourself not to notice? Every workplace has its moments when everyone briefly studies the table, and every seasoned professional has a finely tuned instinct for which observations are career-safe and career-suicide to voice. That instinct is useful. It is also a map of exactly where your integrity has stopped going, and the map gets larger every year it goes unexamined.
Second, the transactional question: what is your job paying you not to feel? Compensation is not only for your time and talent. In some roles, at some altitudes, part of the package is consideration for your willingness to stay comfortable amid things that should make you uncomfortable. Naming what those things are, specifically and in private, is not an act of disloyalty to your employer or an argument to leave. It is an act of loyalty to the person you were before the armor.
Third, and costliest: who is receiving the armored version of you? This is the question that finally broke through for me, because the answer was everyone. My colleagues got the reduced signal, but so did my wife, my daughters, and my friends, none of whom had ever asked for protection from my feelings. The armor I built for the boardroom did not distinguish between audiences. It just held, everywhere, until holding was all it did. The person I love most eventually told me I had been becoming someone I did not like.
I eventually left, but leaving is not the prescription. Plenty of people transform their workplaces from inside them, and plenty of workplaces do not require the trade I made. What I can report is what came after: feeling returned slowly and inconveniently. I found things in it I am still not proud of, and I have stopped expecting absolution from the finding. What I offer instead is the question I wish someone had put to me in year three instead of year thirteen: what does success ask you to stop feeling? And did you ever, even once, agree to those terms out loud?
Sonny Garg is the author of “Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough“, (Amplify Publishing, August 4, 2026), a memoir exploring achievement addiction, immigrant identity, and the search for meaning beyond success. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, Garg was a White House Fellow and rose to executive leadership in a Fortune 125 company. Through his writing and speaking, Garg explores how inherited expectations shape our identities and how we can create lives defined not only by achievement, but by connection and belonging. Learn more at Sonny Garg.
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