Competence Tax

What is this situation?

Competence Tax begins when your manager, project lead, or group chat notices that you can make messy things work. At first, you are asked to cover one missed deadline, clean up a rushed deck, explain a process, or take the late shift because you are the person expected to handle it. Soon the requests arrive without much discussion: a message before the workday starts, a last-minute fix just before a meeting, a friend assuming you will organize the plans, or a teammate forwarding a problem for you to solve. You do what is needed, while the people with formal authority keep the final say and the credit stays diffuse or lands somewhere else. Your competence becomes the reason your workload expands, not the reason your role, pay, influence, or time changes. You open your inbox with your shoulders already tight, knowing that every successful rescue may become the new baseline. By evening, the visible task may be finished, but the hidden coordination, checking, and follow-up remain with you, much like the figure on the Ten of Wands, bent beneath a bundle that blocks the path ahead.

Why it's not you?

The problem is not that you are capable or willing to help; the surrounding people and systems have turned reliability into an automatic source of extra work. Uneven workload, default delegation, unclear credit, and unchanged authority belong to the structure of this situation, not to a flaw in you.