"Do you see anyone here older than their 30s?" The unspeakable angst of the ageing banker
If you work in financial services, and you're not injecting testosterone, taking taurine and trying human growth hormone, you might want a new approach. In an industry famed for its "juniorization," one former Goldman Sachs associate says bankers are desperate to massage the ageing process as they progress through their careers.
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Alexandra Michel was a Goldman associate in the 1990s. She left for academia and is now a reimagined as a roving advisor specialising in organisational change. No one, however, knows more about the banking mindset than Michel. For 17 years after leaving Goldman, Michel tracked a cohort of junior bankers as they progressed through their careers. Now that they're senior and in their 40s, Michel says they're increasingly eager to stay as young as possible.
"Do you see anyone here older than thirties?,” one director asked Michel when she was conducting research for her most recent paper*. "We all can be fired the next minute. You are constantly reminded of that when you see an empty desk that only yesterday was occupied...," the director added.
Instead of gently turning into older, wiser, role models for younger staff, Michel found her study group eternally hustling to stay in the game "I chase opportunity. I create income streams, ideally multiple ones at the same time, and I accept that this requires a lot of change on my part," declared one of her subjects. "I constantly have to requalify, learn new things, prove myself to new people..."
Faced with this angst, Michel found that the senior bankers she was still following were taking matters into their own hands and medicating to stay young. "Whatever your body doesn’t have naturally, you can supplement from the outside," one told her. Hormones, for example: "You can dose it, dial it up or down. You can also radically change capabilities that you thought were fixed, such as temperament, stamina, certain types of cognition, such as creativity. This means that you can become the ideal candidate for whatever opportunity you want to pursue..."
While senior bankers are busy taking hormones to stay sharp, junior bankers are busy taking amphetamines to stay awake. Michel isn't studying the newer banking cohorts coming through, but their predilection for Adderall is well-documented. Last year, the Wall Street Journal found that drugs used to treat ADHD are so common that snorting crushed tablets off the desk has become a norm.
It would be nice if banking careers were more forgiving. Unfortunately, change is unlikely. Nor is the pay perceived as enough to walk away. “I have to work for the unforeseeable future," one of the 40-something bankers told Michel. If that means injecting testosterone, so be it.
*When Society Changes, So Do Bodies: Liquid Lives, Liquid Biologies
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