To be a loan underwriter in a credit union is to live in a perpetual tension between institutional mandate and human conscience. Your sole existence is to protect the cooperative, to uphold its financial integrity, to safeguard the deposits of the many from the risks of the few. Yet each day, you are confronted with the quiet tragedies of economic life: the single mother working three jobs and still falling behind, the retiree with medical debt clawing at his dignity, the young couple crushed by student loans before they’ve had a chance to begin. The policies urge caution. The spreadsheets demand a denial. And somewhere between the policy manual and the collection letters, your humanity erodes.
It is this erosion of empathy that becomes the true moral battleground. Institutionalized empathy is a slippery substance to stand on. You, the underwriter, become an arbiter of who is "helpable" and who must be "protected from themselves." Each denial chips away at your certainty, and over time, the real danger is not cruelty, but numbness. To care deeply is to suffer daily. To protect your sanity is to drift toward apathy. And in that space between caring too much and not enough, resides the quiet moral exhaustion of the job.
Good Lord I suffer sometimes, but I do care deeply.