When cutting the corner would be easy

There's a particular temptation in unwatched work: the corner you could cut clean, with zero chance of getting caught. The expense you could pad. The step you could skip in the safety check. The hour you could log that you didn't quite work. The system has a blind spot, and you can see straight into it. Whatever you'd save, the math seems to say yes.

But look at what you'd actually be trading. Marcus Aurelius noticed that a wrong act doesn't really damage the world or even the person you do it to — it damages the one place it can't be hidden from: "wickedness does no harm at all to the universe; and particularly the wickedness of one man does no harm to another. It is only harmful to him who has it in his power to be released from it" (Meditations 8.55, Long). The padded number doesn't dent the company. It dents you.

That's the strange mercy in it. Your integrity was never in anyone else's hands — not the auditor's, not the boss's. It's the one thing no blind spot can take and no one can hand back to you. You either keep it or you spend it.