The hero falls

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Author’s Note

I wrote this piece in a moment where I wasn’t sure if I could keep doing the right thing.

Not because I no longer believed in it—but because I was starting to realize how rarely it changes anything. How often goodness feels like a burden more than a virtue. How exhausting it is to care in systems designed to reward the opposite.

This isn’t an argument. It’s not even a warning. It’s a mirror I held up to myself when I was too tired to pretend I wasn’t unraveling. I needed to understand why the world seemed to punish consistency, integrity, empathy—and why I kept clinging to them anyway.

It’s hard to admit how deeply that question shakes you when you’ve built your identity around being “the good one.” When you find yourself quietly asking, Is it weakness to stop? Or is it self-preservation?
And worse—Have I already started to let go without noticing?

This piece isn’t the answer. It’s the friction, spilled out through a keyboard because I believe I sometimes think that my own ethics are reinforced by being set to page.

The ache between the person I’ve been, and the person I might have to become if I want to survive and be appreciated in places that no longer make space for conscience and stewardship.

But for now, at least, I’m still here. Still choosing.

Still trying to be good—not because it works, but because I wouldn’t recognize myself if I stopped.

~Dom

The hero falls.

Not in glory, not in fire, not in some climactic battle against evil incarnate.

Just… falls.

He misjudges a gap. A mistimed dodge. A stray arrow. The last heart gives out with a flicker, and the screen begins to fade.

“Game Over.”

The familiar music plays. A prompt appears. Continue?

And somewhere, far behind that glowing screen, the story resets. The world forgets. A new beginning, another Link.

But this one remembers.

He does not cry out as he dies. He hasn’t in lifetimes. Not because it doesn’t hurt, but because what would be the point? The scream doesn’t echo. It doesn’t linger. It doesn’t matter. This version of him—this Link—feels it, though. The weight. The shame. Not of death, but of being discarded. Of trying, and being erased. Of being one of the good ones who wasn’t good enough.

There have been so many.

The Link who drowned inches from the shore. The Link who missed the switch and was crushed by a puzzle meant to teach timing. The Link who wandered too far before the blade was found, who died with only a stick in his hands. The one who froze at the sound of her voice. The one who bled out in the dark with no fairy left to save him. The one who lost not because he was weak, but because he was tired.

Good. All of them good. Brave, too. But bravery is not immunity. And goodness, it turns out, is not protection. The system does not grieve them. It doesn’t even acknowledge them. Because the story must go on, and the story only remembers the one who wins.

And so the others vanish. No gravestones. No statues. No memory. Just dust between save files.

This is the part the story never shows you: The moment when the hero dies knowing he won’t be remembered. And chooses to try anyway.

Because even now, even after all the lives lost and forgotten, something in him refuses to become cruel. Refuses to stop hoping. Refuses to let the darkness be the last word.

He will fail again. He knows that now. But until the very last frame fades… He will be good.

Recommended Listening:

All the World’s a Stage…

The world beyond the game is no different.

Goodness—real, unarmored, unadvertised goodness—rarely gets remembered. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t shout.

It shows up quietly. It stays late. It absorbs the damage.

The one who fixes the mistake that wasn’t theirs. The one who checks in on the colleague everyone else has written off. The one who raises a concern, even when they know it’ll cost them. The one who carries the weight because someone has to—and they can.

These are not the stories that get told.

There’s no epic arc for the woman who trains her replacement, even as she’s being let go. No heroic soundtrack for the man who walks away from an unethical promotion. No statue for the whistleblower who sleeps with one eye open. No lore for the thousands who showed up, held the line, and disappeared when the politics shifted.

Their work was honest. Their actions right. Their impact real. But the spotlight moved on.

They were not useful anymore, and so they were edited out. Downsized. Ghosted. Labeled difficult. Burned out. Replaced by someone cheaper, louder, more aligned with the new direction.

And somewhere inside, they carry that silent question: If it didn’t change anything, did it matter that I was good?

That’s the cruelty of modern systems—not just that they exploit the good, but that they leave them wondering whether their effort was foolish. Whether their refusal to cut corners was a mistake. Whether their integrity was just a costume for naivety.

Moral exhaustion isn’t just burnout. It’s the erosion of belief. The slow, grinding realization that doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee protection, credit, or even survival.

And yet… So many still try. Not for applause. Not for promotion. But because something in them can’t bear to become what they despise. Because they remember what it felt like to be protected by someone else’s decency—and now it’s their turn.

They are the ones who keep the code clean, the patients safe, the systems fair, the harm minimized. They are not always thanked. Often, they are punished.

But they are the reason the whole thing hasn’t collapsed. They are the good ones. And like the forgotten Links, they may never be seen.

But their choice is no less heroic for it.

And all the Men and Women Merely Players

Goodness has never been the default outcome of power. In most systems—corporate, political, even interpersonal—the path to influence is rarely paved with kindness. It’s built on proximity, pliability, perception. And increasingly, it rewards performance over principle.

Say the right things. Hit the right metrics. Project the right narrative. Forget whether the substance is real—just keep the optics clean.

It’s not that organizations want bad people. It’s that they’re designed to promote those who make things easy for those above them. Challenge becomes friction. Friction becomes threat. And the one who refuses to falsify, to look away, to sugarcoat—becomes inconvenient.

The systems don’t always punish the good deliberately. Sometimes, they just don’t know what to do with them. Integrity doesn’t slot neatly into a KPI. Ethical discomfort doesn’t fit on a dashboard. Speaking up creates meetings, delays, reputational risk.

Meanwhile, the one who adapts. Who glosses over. Who plays along. They move up.

They’re not better. They’re just better at the game. And over time, the game forgets it was ever supposed to be about anything else. This is the true erosion—not of values, but of memory.

A company forgets what its mission meant. A team forgets what excellence used to feel like. A person forgets why they cared in the first place.

Until all that’s left are slogans and targets and an endless performance of alignment.

Incentives shape culture. But silence cements it.

And so the good ones start to go quiet. They withdraw, or comply… or leave. Not because they stopped caring—but because they finally saw what the system actually values.

And it wasn’t them.

So We Beat On, Boats Against the Current

There is a unique grief that comes from trying to do right in a world that no longer recognizes it. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It drips. It gnaws. It whispers.

You watch someone lie and get promoted. You watch someone cover up harm and get praised for “decisiveness.” You do the right thing, and nothing changes. Or worse—everything gets harder.

And maybe for a while, you still push through. You tell yourself it’s about the principle. The precedent. The example you’re setting. You tell yourself someone has to be the one who doesn’t look away.

But then one day, you catch yourself hesitating. You feel the weight in your chest before you even speak. The weariness. The futility. The internal calculus that starts with, Is this worth it? and ends with, What’s the point?

It’s not cowardice. It’s the erosion of faith.

You are still good. Still honest. Still capable. But you are tired in places you didn’t know could ache.

And in the quiet, you begin to wonder: What if the world doesn’t need another good person? What if it just needs another cog?

And then—you look around.

You see others who gave up. The bright ones who grew bitter. The kind ones who became callous. The principled ones who stopped speaking. People who were once the light in the room now dimmed to embers. You understand them now in a way you didn’t before.

But you also see the few who haven’t given in.

The teacher who still shows up for her students, even when the system fails her. The nurse who keeps advocating, even when management tells her not to. The engineer who won’t cut corners, even when pressured to do so. The friend who always listens, even when no one else does.

You see them, and something in you remembers why you started.

Being good isn’t about outcome. It’s about refusal. Refusal to become indifferent. Refusal to betray what matters. Refusal to hand your soul over just because the world would find it easier if you did.

But carrying that fire hurts. It isolates. It ages you. And some days, it almost doesn’t feel worth it.

That’s not weakness. That’s the cost of being the last good person in a room full of people who stopped trying.

The Refusal is the Revolution

So… what now?

What do you do when you’ve seen too much to be naive, but you haven’t yet given up? When you know the system isn’t built to reward people like you—and still, you can’t bring yourself to cheat, to numb out, to fall in line?

You stop waiting to be seen. You stop measuring your worth by impact, by outcome, by applause. You stop treating goodness as currency.

And you start treating it as a practice. Being good, now, must become an act of self-declaration, or perhaps protest.

Not a performance. Not a brand. Not for others to consume or like, or re-whatever. But a quiet, persistent rebellion against the erosion of meaning.

You hold the door open. You give the honest feedback. You admit fault. You draw the boundary. You say the thing no one wants to say. You protect someone who won’t even realize they were in danger. You help those you see struggling to help themselves.

And you do it knowing it won’t scale. Knowing it might cost you. Knowing there will be days it feels like spitting into the wind. Because the alternative—the slow rot of moral surrender—is worse.

The revolution, for people like you, won’t come from rage or riots or righteous speeches. It comes from the daily refusal to become what the system makes easy. It comes from seeing clearly, and choosing not to abandon your humanity in return.

Refusing to become cruel. Refusing to become cold. Refusing to reduce yourself to a tool for someone else’s metrics.

You are not a brand. You are not a resource. You are not an input to optimize.

You are a person. And you remember what it means to be one. That alone is radical, and sometimes, it must also be enough.

Because in a world that demands conversion—of your values into productivity, your time into content, your empathy into liability—remembering who you are is a kind of revolution.

So no, you may not win. You may not be remembered. You may not even be thanked.

But you will have chosen. And in that choice—clear, human, uncorrupted—you will become something they can’t erase.

The last good person does not save the world. But they remind it what salvation, or just something better than what they accepted, would look like.

Continue?

There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting—one of those rare moments in cinema where someone speaks so plainly and precisely about pain that it stops pretending to be fiction. Sean, the therapist, looks at Will—the genius, the guarded, the unscarred—and tells him the truth:

“You don’t know about real loss, ‘cause it only occurs when you’ve loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.”

The silence that follows isn’t just dramatic. It’s sacred. Because in that moment, we’re reminded that knowing is not the same as understanding. Reading about suffering isn’t the same as living it. And quoting wisdom doesn’t make you wise.

Just like performing goodness isn’t the same as being good.

Because goodness—the kind that matters—isn’t clean or comfortable. It doesn’t come with accolades or immunity. It doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Often, it comes at a cost. It means choosing to act with integrity even when no one is watching, even when the outcomes are unclear, even when the world you live in incentivizes the opposite.

Being good is rarely efficient. It’s rarely strategic. It almost never pays off in ways that others can see.

And still… you do it.

You do it because you remember what it felt like to be protected by someone else’s courage. Because you know what it is to be left behind, and you refuse to become someone who would do the same. Because somewhere deep inside, despite everything, you believe that goodness—real, painful, quiet goodness—is still worth practicing.

You won’t be remembered in the minutes or the metrics. You won’t be profiled in the shareholder deck. You may not even be thanked. You’ll be the one who fixed it before it broke. Who caught the fall before it happened. Who stood there and said, No. Not like this.

And maybe, like Link, you’ll fall. Again and again. Quietly. Without anyone seeing the ways you tried to hold the kingdom together.

But every time someone presses “Continue,” it’s because of people like you.

Because you were there. Because you stayed human. Because you didn’t become what the world made easy.

There is a reward. It’s not applause. It’s not legacy.

It’s that you get to live in a way that doesn’t betray who you are.

And that? That’s the kind of good no system can erase.