People like to believe we’ve evolved since those candlelit rituals in cold English cottages, but we really haven’t. The setting changed. The superstition didn’t. We still want to be clean. We still want to be seen as good. And when we can’t be, we find someone to carry the weight for us.
You wanna talk weird jobs? I’m not talking about the things Mike Rowe discovers on his show, those are some weird jobs, but think of this: back in the 17th Century England, if you were a bad person who happened to be wealthy, you could hire some poor sot, and I do mean poor in the monetary sense, and have that person eat your sins. That person was a sin eater.
Yes, you heard me right, they would eat your sins. The idea was that you could have your sins expunged from your life by having someone consume them and thus take on your sin burden. The process involved hiring a person to eat bread and milk that had been placed on a dead person’s chest. The poor person would then eat those items while praying or chanting. In the end, the rich person was sin-free, and the poor person was loaded down with the rich man’s sins, which they would carry into the next life, but in this life, their poverty was alleviated slightly with the fees given to them to eat the sins.
The job was taken by the very poor, I mean the poorest of the poor, and they were only paid the equivalent of a few dollars, which was not much when you think of the burden they suddenly took on. In other places, such as larger cities, there would be a professional sin eater, and they would be paid more.
Imagine that. Making your living by consuming the darkness that other people paid to forget.
The Business of Purity
People like to believe we’ve evolved since those candlelit rituals in cold English cottages, but we really haven’t. The setting changed. The superstition didn’t.
We still want to be clean. We still want to be seen as good. And when we can’t be, we find someone to carry the weight for us.
In the 1600s, it was a man with a crust of bread and an empty stomach. Today, it’s a brand manager, a PR team, or an agency paid to polish the story until it gleams. The process is the same: the guilt doesn’t disappear, it just gets repackaged.
We call it reputation management. Brand refresh. Narrative control. Crisis communication. But underneath the jargon sits the same fragile need — to be forgiven without doing much changing.
We don’t like mess. We say we do, but we don’t. The flawed, the complicated — those make us nervous. So we buy the illusion instead, the version of integrity that looks clean on camera. And we’ll pay for it, too. Whole industries are built on that hunger to be forgiven — the detoxes, the rebrands, the carefully worded apologies that sound like they came from a poet’s desk. We call it growth, but most of the time it’s just cleanup with better lighting.
Every time a company says, That’s not who we are anymore, there’s a quiet transaction happening. Someone’s been hired to eat the sin. Someone’s job is to turn what was messy and human into something inspirational.
And for a little while, it works. The public moves on. The story resets. The ledger looks balanced again.
Until the next slip, the next scandal, the next thing that needs to be consumed.
The Creatives Who Carry It
Every job has its rituals. For sin eaters, it was bread and milk. For us, it’s a blank screen. A blinking cursor. A client call that starts with, We need to fix this fast.
You can feel it before you even open the brief. That low hum of panic hiding behind polite words. Something went wrong. Something didn’t land. Something about this brand — this image — has cracked, and now they need someone to make it whole again.
That’s what we do. We take the fear and turn it into story. We take the guilt and shape it into design. We take confusion and package it as clarity. We make the wrong thing look right again.
It doesn’t feel dishonest, not exactly. It feels like empathy, like translation. You understand why they’re scared. You know why they can’t afford to look broken. So you swallow the discomfort, the hypocrisy, the late-night revisions, and you keep going. You eat it quietly because that’s what professionals do.
The creative field runs on this unspoken transaction. Brands get to stay clean; we absorb the chaos. They offload the tension; we metabolize it into beauty. The better we are at it, the more invisible the process becomes.
People call it talent. They say, You have such a gift for capturing the voice, for smoothing the edges, for finding the light. They don’t see the shadow that comes with it — the part of you that wonders who you are when you’re not fixing someone else’s reflection.
You start to feel it over time. Every campaign, every launch, every rebrand adds a layer. Not of skill, but of residue. Because it’s not just the work you carry — it’s the fear, the denial, the wish to be forgiven without changing.
And the strange part is, it’s beautiful work. That’s the trick. You can take the most cynical brief and still create something elegant and moving. That’s what keeps you in it. That’s what keeps you proud. But it’s also what keeps you trapped — the belief that turning pain into art redeems it.
We never call it sin. We call it deliverables. We call it revisions. We call it just another Tuesday. But every time we hit send on something that makes a brand feel better without getting better, we’re eating another bite.
The Emotional Weight of the Work
It starts small. A twinge in the back of your mind after a long day. A strange heaviness that doesn’t feel like tiredness but sits in the same place. You tell yourself it’s just stress. You close the laptop, you make dinner, you scroll, you sleep.
But it follows you.
It sticks with you — the leftovers from all the talks, the rewrites, the back-and-forths. The little bargains you make to keep the project moving. The moments when you polish something that probably didn’t deserve to shine. You carry that weight quietly, like a secret you never meant to keep.
The days speed up. The asks pile on. People still clap, still tell you it’s great work, but somehow the sound hits different. Somewhere in there, you start mistaking empathy for endurance. You start thinking that being good means outlasting everyone else. You think being good at your job means absorbing everything without flinching.
So you do. You nod through calls that drain you. You fix work you don’t believe in. You say yes to timelines that ask for miracles. You convince yourself that grace under pressure is the highest form of professionalism.
And on the surface, it works. The campaigns land. The clients smile. The brand feels redeemed. But when the room clears, you can still feel the ache of what it took. The slight erosion that happens every time you turn something hollow into something beautiful.
There’s a reason so many creatives reach a point where they don’t want to make anything at all. It’s not because they’ve lost their imagination — it’s because they’ve spent too long using it to clean up other people’s messes. You can only take in so much of the world’s fear before it starts to look familiar.
The burnout isn’t sudden. It arrives quietly. You start to forget what your own voice sounds like. You avoid projects that might ask you to feel something real because you’re afraid you won’t be able to separate it from the rest. The line between creation and consumption blurs — you’re no longer making, you’re digesting.
You catch yourself working on autopilot, building something beautiful for a product or company you wouldn’t defend over dinner. You promise yourself it’s temporary. You promise you’ll make something for you next time. But next time comes with another brief, another deadline, another client who needs to be forgiven.
And still, you care. That’s the strange, tender part of it. You still believe in the power of what you do — the story, the craft, the possibility of connection. You still chase the moment when the work feels pure, when it feels like it matters. But those moments get rarer, like light through old glass.
Eventually, you begin to wonder whose story you’re really telling. Theirs? Yours? Or some composite version built out of exhaustion and talent and the quiet hope that maybe, if you just keep eating it, it’ll mean something in the end.
The Price of Absorption
In the old villages, sin eaters were both needed and shunned. Families called them in when someone died, then crossed the street to avoid them the next day. They wanted what the sin eater provided, but they didn’t want to be reminded of what it meant.
That part hasn’t changed either.
The creative world is full of modern sin eaters — people asked to take the burden but never the credit. Their names are missing from the press release, and their faces are missing from the stage. They’re expected to absorb everything and still smile, to make the impossible feel effortless.
We call it professionalism. We call it hustle. We call it passion.
But what we really mean is: Keep taking it. Keep saying yes. Keep swallowing the things that don’t sit right. Keep pretending that exhaustion is a badge of honor.
The system rewards absorption. The more you can take, the more you’re trusted. The more you can spin chaos into beauty, the more clients will come back. And each time, the weight grows a little heavier. Each time, the distance between what you make and what you believe stretches a little farther.
It’s strange how invisible it all becomes. Burnout gets rebranded as dedication. Overwork gets praised as ownership. The very things that hollow you out are the ones people admire you for. You don’t notice the cost until you look up one day and realize that the work that once made you feel alive now only makes you feel useful.
And maybe that’s the most dangerous part — that this isn’t a rare tragedy but an accepted trade. The industry survives on the idea that some people will always be willing to eat the sin for the sake of the story. That creativity means self-erasure. That art and exhaustion are twins.
It’s not sustainable, but it’s self-perpetuating. Because every time a burnt-out creative leaves, another one steps in, hungry to prove themselves, ready to carry the weight just to be seen.
The cycle keeps spinning because it’s built on something we don’t want to admit: the belief that purity — whether of brand, story, or ambition — is worth more than the person creating it.
A Better Kind of Redemption
At some point, the sin eater stopped showing up. Maybe he got sick. Perhaps he just had enough. And when he was gone, no one replaced him. The ritual faded. People started facing the truth — that the dead had to carry their own souls. That redemption couldn’t be outsourced.
Maybe that’s where we are now.
The world is changing. Audiences are changing. The illusion of purity doesn’t work like it used to. People can feel when a brand’s story has been scrubbed too clean. They can sense when the shine doesn’t match the substance. The hunger for perfection is wearing thin. What people want now is honesty — the kind that still has fingerprints on it.
And that’s good news. Because it means the weight can be shared. It means creatives don’t have to keep eating what isn’t theirs. It means brands can stop pretending they’ve never made mistakes and start showing what they learned from them instead.
What if the new form of purity isn’t flawlessness but ownership? What if the next great marketing movement isn’t redemption, but responsibility?
The brands that will matter most in the next decade won’t be the spotless ones. They’ll be the self-aware ones — the ones that show their work, their thinking, their humanity. The ones that tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.
And the ones who’ll last — the ones who actually thrive — will be the people who stop carrying everyone else’s sins. They’ll make things from a steadier place, not out of panic or cleanup duty. The work will still be beautiful, maybe even more so, because it’ll come from partnership instead of penance.
Maybe that’s what redemption really looks like. Not a brand that got scrubbed clean, but a person who finally feels whole again.
The Takeaway
Sometimes I think about that sin eater. The image doesn’t leave you — a man sitting alone at a table, eating what others couldn’t face.
— a man alone at a table, eating someone else’s sins by candlelight, believing he’s doing them a kindness. Maybe he was. Perhaps he just didn’t know there was another way.
We’ve built a modern version of that ritual. We call it branding, or storytelling, or content. But really, it’s the same hunger: the wish to be seen as pure, the hope that someone else can carry the weight for us.
The truth is, we don’t need more sin eaters. We need braver brands. We need creators who stop carrying everything and start asking better questions — the kind that lead to honesty instead of illusion.
At ThoughtLab, that’s where we live. We believe in building work that doesn’t hide behind polish. Work that owns its story, scars and all. Because what people trust isn’t perfection — it’s humanity.
So maybe the lesson isn’t how to cleanse the story, but how to tell it cleanly. Maybe the goal isn’t to make something flawless, but to make something true.
Because the best brands — and the best creators — aren’t the ones who’ve eaten their sins. They’re the ones who’ve faced them.
