How do I carry knowing everyone's salary at work?

You can design pay that is fair and competitive, real craft. But it left you carrying a quiet, strange weight, knowing what everyone is worth on paper, sitting in meetings holding numbers about people who do not know you hold them. That is an odd kind of loneliness, and feeling it means you understand these are people, not line items. Here is a way to hold it that helps. The number is what the market and the company assign to a role. It is not the measure of the human being. You know that better than anyone, because you have seen how imperfect and political the numbers can be. Do not let the paper worth blur into the real worth of the person in front of you. Keep those separate in your own mind. And carry the weight with integrity, which you clearly already do. Let the burden of knowing make you more fair, more discreet, more human in how you treat people, not more cynical. The quiet weight is the price of doing this job with a conscience. Set it down where you can, keep the conscience, and remember: you are a person too, not a number in someone else's file.