You lose more of yourself than you redeem
Doing the decent thing.

The lines suggest a bleak moral arithmetic: acting “decently” can demand self-erasure—compromise, silence, or the surrender of one’s instincts and loyalties—so that the ethical choice may feel like a net loss of identity rather than a redemption. Read in a Heaney-like key, it can evoke the pressures of public conscience and communal expectation, where doing what is right (or what is deemed right) entails giving up parts of the self that cannot be recovered. The bitterness in “more…than you redeem” implies that moral action is not automatically ennobling; it can be costly, leaving the actor diminished even as the action remains necessary.