Conditional values aren't values
People ask me, fairly regularly, whether I’m worried that being outspoken about things that matter to me will cost me opportunities.
My answer is always the same: yes, obviously. And it already has.
That usually surprises them. They’re asking as a warning, not an inquiry. The subtext is be more careful. I hear it. I’ve thought about it. But if you only hold your values when it’s safe to hold them, they’re not values. They’re preferences.
I’ve been in conversations recently where I had to make real calls about this. Not hypothetical ones. Situations where the risk wasn’t abstract - where I could see the shape of what might happen if I said the thing I believed needed saying. Where people I respect told me honestly: I can’t promise it’ll be fine. Where I had to sit with the possibility that doing the right thing, for me, might create friction for people I care about.
I slept on it. More than once.
And then I did the thing anyway.
Not because I was certain it would work out. I wasn’t. Not because I’m fearless. I’m not. But because the alternative - staying quiet because I was afraid of what might happen - would have made my values conditional. And conditional values aren’t values.
Companies do this all the time, and we’ve gotten very good at not noticing.
A company writes values on the wall. Puts them in the handbook. Talks about them in all-hands meetings. And mostly, those values hold - right up until a customer is large enough, or a contract is important enough, or a revenue target is close enough. Then the values get quiet. Nobody says they’re abandoning them. They just stop being the thing that drives decisions.
This is capitalism doing exactly what it’s designed to do. The pressure is structural. When survival - or growth, or the quarterly number - depends on keeping the right people happy, values become a luxury. Something you can afford until you can’t.
And that pressure doesn’t stay in the boardroom. It flows downstream. Into managers. Into individual contributors. Into you, sitting with a decision about whether to say the thing you believe, knowing that someone above you is already doing the math.
I think about this a lot. The system is very good at making silence feel like the rational choice.
I know this from the inside. I haven’t always held the line.
I’ve worked for employers who made it clear, explicitly or otherwise, what I was and wasn’t allowed to say publicly. And I complied. I’ve chosen silence more than once because the economic risk of speaking felt too high. There’s a blog I kept from roughly 2010 to 2017 that no longer exists anywhere on the internet - not because I deleted it carelessly, but because I let it be scrubbed. At the time, that felt like the practical choice. Looking back, it feels like something I lost.
I’m not beating myself up over it. The pressure was real. The fear was real. Capitalism is very good at making you feel like you have no choice, and sometimes the material stakes are high enough that you genuinely don’t. I’m not here to judge anyone who has made the same call.
But I’m older now. The world has changed, and keeps changing, in ways that make silence feel increasingly untenable to me. And I’ve learned, slowly and not without cost, that compromising my values in the name of economic security isn’t a trade I’m willing to keep making. The security it buys is real. What it costs is also real.
Here’s the thing about values: having them is cheap. Saying you have them is cheaper still. The cost comes when you’re tested.
Maybe the test is publishing something that could get you fired. Maybe it’s refusing to work on a project you believe is causing harm. Maybe it’s speaking up in a meeting where everyone else is nodding. Maybe it’s leaving a job - or a community - when staying would require you to look away from something you can’t look away from.
The test is always the same: what do you do when it costs you something?
I haven’t always gotten it right. I’ve failed that test before, and I’ll probably fail it again. But I’m trying to fail it less. I’m trying to make the call earlier, with less deliberation, because I already know what I believe - I’m just working up the nerve to act on it.
People will keep asking if I’m worried about the cost. I’ll keep telling them yes, and that I know it’s already cost me things, and that I’m going to keep doing it anyway.