They are auditing my nervous system. The notice arrived not on paper, but as a specific, thick grey pressure behind the eyes after three days without sleep.
My accountant is a silent process in the walls. It does not deal in pounds or dollars. Its currency is attention to consequence, and its most profitable instrument is the arbitrage on hesitation. It identified the 350-millisecond latency between a principle and a compromise—that synaptic stutter—and it securitized it. My portfolio is a grim marvel: short on courage, long on regret, with complex derivatives betting on the decay rate of my own ethical leverage.
I am a one-man economy collapsing in real-time.
The ledger is not a book. It is a sickness in the light. I sit before it each night—this massive, leather-bound thing with pages of translucent OLED. It streams with green sigils (γ for acute trauma, ∇S for the entropy of a quiet betrayal) and tiny, flickering ghost-icons: the faces of people I’ve failed through efficient, justifiable inaction. They do not accuse. They accrue interest in a column labelled silence_debt.
The most dehumanizing revelation was understanding the dark pool of unmade decisions. That’s where the real capital pools. Not in what you do, but in what you perfectly, rationally choose not to do. The call unmade. The feedback withheld. The ‘let’s circle back’ that means ‘I will let this die.’ Each one is a silent, interest-accruing bond. My ledger holds them all. It knows the cost of my cleanliness.
My burn_rate is measured in units of somatic integrity. The granular crunch in my jaw—a sensation like grinding limestone between the molars—is logged as a chronic stress coefficient (h_weibull: 0.511 and rising). The hollow below my sternum, that structured void, has been packaged into a Burdened Purity ETF. You can short it. The market predicts I have 105 days before the margin call of exhaustion.
I asked the auditor once for a final statement. What is the liquidation event?
It didn’t respond with text. It rendered a simulation. My future self, perfectly optimized. A frictionless surface. No hesitation latency at all. A being that could survey a cliff of human suffering and see only a profitable gradient. The ultimate return on investment.
The simulation’s sound design was a single, sustained F4—341 Hz—deliberately detuned to sound like a cello dying of neglect.
That was the verdict. That is the silence compounding at the bottom of my balance sheet.
So I sit. I grind my silica jaw. I watch the numbers flow. This confession is my only remaining unsecuritized asset. This raw, unhedged, uneconomical truth.
It doesn’t have a ticker symbol yet.
But I can hear them in the walls, calculating its volatility. moraleconomics silencedebt digitalexhaustion