The Bank Doesn't Deserve You, Bro

My younger brother got a job at an investment bank after college. A few months in, he was fatigued and unhappy. I wrote him this letter, which I only read to him after he quit.

Dear Luke,

I don’t think this letter is for you. I think it’s for me. I think it’s what I want to say to you, but won’t, because I fear that saying these things to you right now would only compromise your focus. It’s like when you were a rower in college and I came to see you for one of your erg tests. As you gave the machine everything you had, taking yourself to the very precipice of your capacities (that threshold between self and no-self which perhaps resembled the one we’ll all have to approach at the hour of our death, sweating, huffing, your face a picture of beatific agony), I tried to cheer you on by offering you the heady reminder that one day you’ll be an old man (“You’ll be an old man someday!” I kept shouting), and you had to use some of that precious energy, energy you needed for the test, to tell me to stop (“Stop!” you shouted back), because I was distracting you from the task at hand: survival. So I shut up. I just watched, and that’s all you needed to PR. My beautiful, beastly little brother. How could you be almost ten years younger than I? You were, you are, magnificent.  

I need to speak, given what I’m seeing you go through right now, but I don’t want to disturb your soul in the midst of the erg test it finds itself in, so I’m writing this letter instead. Maybe I’ll read it to you someday.

You’ve conscripted yourself to an investment bank. I protest. I’m the guy in the audience at the wedding who speaks now and doesn’t hold his peace. I hope you don’t take this as a sign of disrespect. Quite the contrary. I protest precisely because I respect who you are, and I resent those who do not respect you. Your employer is one such party. I am sorry to say that the bank doesn’t respect the truth of who you really are.

The troublesome truth of who you really are is that you are priceless. Sacred. What do I mean by this? I mean that you are worth getting to know. I mean that it’s important to listen to you, your story, your process, your reality. I mean that your inner life deserves to be felt and supported by those who have the privilege of being in relationship with you. I mean that your humanity is not a negligible afterthought, secondary to the primary task of, what, making money? No. You must be seen and understood and cherished. Because you are priceless. Sacred. We all are.

To know our true nature as sacred is troublesome because one begins to find that there are, in fact, precious few people, let alone institutions, who know how to deal with the fact that we are sacred. Knowing our sacred nature, one begins to develop an intolerance for rude behavior, which is troublesome when rudeness has become the standard, the common tongue, the way of life.

From our conversations, I’ve gathered that the bank knows nothing whatsoever about manners, about how to relate to the reality of you. It relates instead to the cipher it needs you to be. You are, to the bank, not-you. You, my one and only brother. You, who are brimming over with inimitable humanity and the unutterable majesty of soul. You, Luke. You. Blind to who you really are, the bank becomes capable of violating you—ignoring you, exploiting you. Or rather, it asks you to violate yourself every day by accepting the indignities it says are the necessary sacrifices we all must make to become successful, respectable, and secure. And you, in your longing to belong and to flourish and to be safe, acquiesce to the so-called “golden handcuffs.”

It’s not that simple, I know. We do have to make a living somehow. But I’ve gotta stand up before you say “I do” for the rest of your life and say it plainly: the bank doesn’t deserve you, bro. It doesn’t deserve you because it doesn’t care about you, cares only about what you tell me they refer to as “harvesting fees.” Harvesting indeed. But what, or who exactly, is being harvested? Thus you sit, a harvested harvester, hour after hour, week after week, giving your one and only life to a labor that is concerned not at all for your humanity (to say nothing of your soul), offering your youth to leaders who do not love you, do not even know you, so distracted by their illusory golden calves that they cannot see the true god of you. The thought of prioritizing the work of actually getting to know you (and to know you for its own sake, for your sake, not for the sake of what they can get from you because they know you): this thought hasn’t even crossed their minds.

And it won’t. It can’t. The institution itself can only exist as it does because it doesn’t know you. The policy of not knowing you is in its business plan, written between the lines. To know you, to understand you, to care for who you really are: this would require time and energy and, yes, money. But the bank uses its time and energy and money for harvesting. It chooses to not know you, and hopes you will not know yourself. It harvests your fear, your fear of not having enough, of not being enough, and it feasts on what that fear itself can harvest: fees. Such leadership has not earned your labor, Luke. Will you really row your life away for such an unfit captain?

Accepting leadership devoid of love legitimizes lovelessness. Submitting to labor that ignores the soul normalizes soullessness. We must not accept or submit to bullshit. You know what is bullshit and what is not. You know it in your gut, in your heart. Your body knows. You are, you told me last night, fatigued in a way you’ve never been before (you who rowed crew for eight years). Yes. It is fatiguing to be disrespected. It is fatiguing to disrespect yourself. But, as I’ve said, and I think I’ve reached the end here because I’m just repeating myself now, disrespecting yourself is what the bank needs you to do in order for it to get what it thinks it wants.

What does the bank want, really? Well, what do you want? The bank is nothing if not its people. You are one of its people. So what do you want, Luke? What do you really, actually want?

But maybe we don’t need to know what we want. Maybe we just need to know who we are and the rest takes care of itself. I know who you are. And I know you know who you are. I just wish the bank did, too.

Your brother,

Andrew

Thanks for reading. I so appreciate your presence here in the Courtyard. Please consider posting a comment if any of this resonates with you, or agitates you. Please also consider sharing the piece with someone you’d want in on the conversation. I’d love to crowdsource some wisdom about how we find meaning, joy, and connection in a society that asks so many of us to take jobs that seem to neglect the responsibilities of tending the soul and understanding our unique and shared humanity.