The Emotional Tax

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Jung described the shadow as the contents of yourself you refuse to acknowledge which then gets projected outward onto other people with the precision you'd never apply to your own behavior. The reliable indicator that you're in your own shadow and not seeing someone else clearly is the intensity of the reaction. The behavior that makes you most contemptuous is the shortest distance to what you're managing in yourself under a better story. I spent a long time treating that as an interesting observation about other people's psychology. During that same period, I was doing the exact things I found most contemptable in others, using my intelligence to maintain distance and calling it discernment, distributing a general emotional tax on the people around me that had nothing to do with it.

[00:00:49]So in other words, the the most accurate name for all of this is being a difficult person to be around, being a piece of someone who had made their own interior dishonesty someone else's daily problem consistently enough that it stopped being an episode and became a pattern.

[00:01:06]The way we talk about toxic behavior as a category of a person that exists over there explained by factors that don't apply to us is exactly the mechanism that keeps it running.

[00:01:17]You can't examine something you've decided you're not inside.

[00:01:22]Victor Frankl observed from inside conditions more extreme than most of us will ever face. That when people lose a sense of meaning, what fills the space is what we is what he called the existential vacuum. An emptiness that expresses itself as the quiet emotional cruelty of someone who has stopped caring about the effect they have on other people. And mind you, he wasn't theorizing this. He was reporting this from 3 years in Nazi concentration camps, watching which people kept something intact and which people didn't, trying to understand what the difference was. And his answer to which was something I resisted for a long time because it didn't fit the nihilism I was living inside. His answer was that psychological survival had less to do with conditions than with whether the person had something outside themselves to hold on to something specific enough to orient toward when everything around you gave you every rational reason to give up.

[00:02:24]I came to while trying to understand what had happened to me, why I'd been um functioning fine externally while something had gone quiet internally. And his description of the existential vacuum was basically the most accurate thing I'd read about what actually felt like from inside.

[00:02:44]The emptiness expressing itself as a lowgrade coldness toward everything which I'd been calling realism.