For the Love of Money (2014)

> 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.”

> I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

> 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 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.

On that thought, when I first stumbled upon it, I found real value in jefftk's [0] earning to give line of thinking [1].

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829330

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-privilege-of-earning-to-give

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadaqah

To tie this closer to what we do:

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.

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.

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.

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.