How do I keep fighting for invisible work no one sees?

You can pay down debt strategically, and you are tired of fighting for the invisible work that quietly stops disasters. That exhaustion makes sense. Prevention is a thankless kind of excellence, because when you do it well, the reward is that nothing bad happens, and nothing is hard to celebrate. Sit with the strange shape of this. The disasters you prevented do not exist, so no one can point to them and thank you. You are, in a real way, being asked to fight for the value of absences. That is genuinely draining, and it is not a sign you are wrong. It is the nature of the work. Two things help. First, keep your own quiet record of the fires that never happened because of choices you made, so you do not lose sight of your worth when others cannot see it. Second, pick your fights. You cannot defend every piece of invisible work, so spend your energy on the few whose failure would truly hurt, and let the smaller ones go. Guard what matters most, and stop bleeding yourself dry over the rest.