Bankers as burned-out members of the petty bourgeoisie
Sociologist Mustafa Yavas knows plenty of people who – like himself - worked hard at top universities to achieve big jobs as bankers, consultants or IT professionals before having the revelation that this might not be what they wanted from life. He’s interviewed 70 of them and bound them up into a new article* for American Sociological Review.
Yavas’ interviewees are all high achieving Turkish nationals like him. Briefly a consultant, he’s now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His 70 interviewees worked for McKinsey & Co., unnamed investment banks or Big Four firms in New York and Istanbul. They’re high achieving, they’re driven, they’re tired. “My hair turned white!,” one Big Four auditor tells him. “If my reality is to work at this job until I am 60 years old, it upsets me,” a banker declared.
What they are not, is living the capitalist dream.
While senior bankers have sometimes been accused of deriving a collectivist-like share of the profit from their activities, Yavas says today's elite professionals are less like privileged owners of capital and more like exhausted members of the petty bourgeois. After embracing the notion that happiness is at the top of the career ladder, Yavas says his 70 high achievers slowly discovered this wasn’t so and voluntarily slid down the rungs.
The fundamental problem is that “overwork suffocates non-work” and that the more you work to achieve career nirvana, the more you fall victim to “impoverished life experiences” in other fields. Yavas says people end up feeling “relatively deprived” despite high salaries and come to the realisation that they have a “deficient relationship to the future,” characterised by “decaying physical and mental health, work-family conflicts, undermined leisure, and social deprivation.”
This all sounds bleak, but isn’t that different to the discoveries of banker-turned academic Alexandra Michel, who found that young bankers typically work themselves into a state of illness and exhaustion before either quitting or developing coping mechanisms. One banker who complained of being "chained to a desk" told Yavas his coping mechanism involves gamifying the job and trying to "level up" in search of work thrills. Another said she was compelled to wind down by staring at a wall for an hour before she could sleep.
Yavas claims there's a career arc, but it's not the one that ends up in a managing director job with houses in the town and the country. As long hours become insufferable, he says people in elite jobs start to reconsider what might really make them content. "This is then followed by a re-evaluation of their priorities in life and whether they can bear the problems they identify with their careers."
Leaving a job paying $150k+ isn't easy. It means paying off debts, saving money and cutting living expenses. Yafas says the people who stay do so because of mortgages, children ("the exorbitant cost of upper-middle-class-reproduction") and overspending. People get addicted to the social status that accompanies a "lifestyle marked by upscale consumption." Yavas quotes one consultant who lamented that if he left his job, he'd lose the "chance to fly business class and dine in the best restaurants of the world simply thanks to your work."
Those who do break the habit, though, discover an entirely different sort of life. The auditor whose hair turned white said that since leaving her Big Four job for something less prestigious and lower paying, she'd taken up knitting, cooking, swimming, reading novels and going to the gym. "I am happy," she declared.
*White collar opt out: How "good jobs" fail elite workers
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