> I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”<p>> I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.<p>> From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.
> <i>I recently got an email from a hedge-fund trader who said that though he was making millions every year, he felt trapped and empty, but couldn’t summon the courage to leave... Maybe we can form a group and confront our addiction together... Let’s create a fund, where everyone agrees to put, say, 25 percent of their annual bonuses into it, and we’ll use that to help some of the people who actually need the money.</i><p>On that thought, when I first stumbled upon it, I found real value in jefftk's [0] <i>earning to give</i> line of thinking [1].<p>Since it is Ramdan right now, most Muslims would voluntarily [2] and obligatorily [3] give away a portion of their wealth to the welfare of the others.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829330" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829330</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-privilege-of-earning-to-give" rel="nofollow">https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-privilege-of-earning-to-give</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadaqah" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadaqah</a>
To tie this closer to what we do:<p>I often think of another NYT article in a similar vein, where they profiled people in the Bay Area whose net worth was in the ~$10m range.<p>This is an enormous amount of money and you'd think nobody would stick at a job they didn't like once they were at this point. As I recall in the article, the people in this situation kept thinking "I just need a little bit more" to enable some important next step on the luxury ladder, like horse lessons for their children.<p>I found this chilling especially because as a person who is wealthy but not that wealthy (note that if you make $40k/yr you're in the top 1% of humans already) I could see myself making similar sorts of rationalizations, not about luxury specifically but more around whether I have enough.<p>I encountered this attitude a lot in the Bay Area for the ~15 years I lived there and it was one of the reasons I recently left -- I worried my son would grow up around it and think that it was somehow normal behavior.