Is this what building a career in investment banking is like, minus the bovine hormone injections?

Inspired blog site Marginal Revolution has come across an interesting, albeit slightly ancient, essay on the fallacy of people envying professional athletes.

Substitute illiteracy and bovine hormones for Excel immersion and caffeine/Modafinil , and could the text below apply equally to the junior banker?

If so, is it really right to envy the 22 year old analyst his or her 70k pay packet?

Your comments. Please.

From David Foster Wallace's 1995 essay, The String Theory:

... it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush cliches about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the pre-fight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.

We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in post-contest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think.

Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life - outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.