"Karōshi": Death from Overwork on Wall Street

It's 2015, and people in America are literally working themselves to death.

Let the insanity of this situation sink in for a second.

In a country with more wealth and opportunity than any before it in history, young people like Thomas Hughes and Sarvshreshth Gupta are sitting at a desk and staring at a computer until something kills them or they kill themselves.

I've been thinking about the tragic stories of Thomas and Sav a lot recently, rolling the same few questions through my head: Why are people with dream jobs committing suicide? What's causing their situations become so bad? And why are thousands of ambitious students fighting tooth and nail to follow in their footsteps?!

Maybe the reason that I can't stop thinking about it is because these stories hit a little too close to home.  I worked as a management consultant for 4 years, and most of my close friends work in finance.  I've worked a few 100+ hour weeks, and had times when I've been burnt out and hating life. While I never once contemplated suicide and I hope my friends haven't either, we often talk about the struggle to balance work with life and whether the sacrifice is worth it.

The following is a quote from Sav, but it just as easily could have been said by me or or one of my friends, "It is too much. I have not slept for two days, have a client meeting tomorrow morning, have to complete a presentation, my VP is annoyed and I am working alone in my office."  Sav died on the same day he said this.

I don't have answers for why Thomas, Sav, and many others made the choice they did.  Suicide and mental health are the domain of trained professionals, and if it's affecting you or someone you know then please talk to someone (click here for a list of international suicide hotlines).

But a good place to start looking for answers is Japan, where they've spent 40 years battling against the social issue of 'Karōshi', a.k.a. 'death from overwork'.

Lessons from the Japanese salaryman

Work-related death and suicide is a significant social issue in Japan, and the unfortunate plight of the Japanese 'salaryman' taught me an important lesson about how we can tackle the problem in the Western world.

Death from overwork is so common in Japan that in the 70s they created two words to describe it — karōshi if the cause is 'natural' like a stroke or heart attack, and karōjisatsu if it is self-inflicted.

But despite nearly 40 years of awareness of the problem, not a lot has changed.  Today, the country faces plummeting national birth rates and low economic productivity because of their systemic work-life balance issues. In March 2015, the government announced another half-measure solution by promising to make it the legal responsibility of workers to take at least five days’ paid holiday a year.

I understand that you have to start somewhere, but this will do nothing in the near term to reverse the "work-hard, play-never" culture in most of Japan.

'Karōshi' on Wall Street

There are concerning parallels between Japan and what's been happening here in recent years.

The high-profile 2013 death of Moritz Erhardt in London caused governments and corporations to acknowledge that there is a serious problem with the work culture on Wall Street and beyond.  And like in Japan, the talk has produced little in terms of meaningful change.

You've probably read or experienced first-hand the half-hearted attempts by big banks to solve the issue of employee burnout.  Let me be the first to say, 'thank you, Goldman Sachs, for telling your interns that they don't have to work more than 17 hours a day'... problem solved!

I have a hard time believing that executive leadership at these banks is naive enough to think these policies will actually make a difference.  Maybe I'm just cynical, but it looks more like an attempt to solve their PR crisis and given them something to talk about during intern recruiting.

This problem won't fix itself

The simple takeaway from these examples is this: we can't wait for governments or corporations to fix the problem of overwork and employee burnout. Maybe eventually they'll produce some effective solutions, but I'm not willing to wait around while people are suffering everyday.

As I see it, you have three options when faced with the challenge of a high-stress, high-demand job:

Option #1: Suffer, sacrifice, and eventually burnout.
Option #2: Quit your job.
Option #3: Accept the challenge and take action.

Knowingly or not, you have probably already selected option #1. It's the default option. It's the option we select when we accept the status quo and do nothing. I did this for 2 years until I hit a low point before I decided to take action.

Some of you should select option #2 — quit. These jobs aren't for everyone, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that. In the end, I decided that management consulting wasn't for me, so I quit. I wish that people like Thomas and Sav had quit instead of making the choices that they did.  But for some people, quitting is not the right option.  Working insanely hard, long hours can suck sometimes, but life has little purpose or meaning if you aren't pursuing excellence at something.  Maybe in the end you'll decide to quit anyways, but at least do it for the right reasons and not because you were too burnt out to give the job a chance.

Finally, there is option #3 — take action. If you're sick of accepting the status quo and are ready to do something about it, then this is the path for you.  It's going to be hard and uncomfortable, but that's what separates the successful people from everyone else.  It took me months of trial-and-error to find things that fixed my burnout, but it's possible and that's all that matters.

And I guess that's the takeaway from this meandering article: burnout is not an inevitable aspect of working a job like banking or consulting. You don't have to feel perpetually exhausted, disengaged, and unhappy. You don't have to sacrifice your youth to succeed.

There's obviously a lot of steps required to fix burnout, but from my experience the most important step is the first step: the mental shift of truly believing that you are in control and that it's possible to succeed without getting burned out.

# # #

I wrote this post because I'm sick of reading news stories like the ones about Sav, Thomas, and Moritz.  I'm not naive enough to think that writing will be enough to solve this problem, but it's a start. Hopefully we can start supporting each other and having more conversations on WSO about what we're actually going through rather than continuously over-exaggerating our hours and acting like working until you get sick is something to be proud of.

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My name is Alistair Clark, and I'm a former management consultant and I now run worklifefitness.co. I consult top-performing business professionals (consultants, bankers, lawyers, etc.) on how to prevent burnout so that they stay healthy, kill it at work, and enjoy life again. I put together a free email course for WSO readers: The 5-Day Burnout Fix.

 

Definitely advertising, but who cares. Gotta get your name out somehow; at least the post is relevant in the field.

I think this post overlooks that there is more to life than work. If you're dead set on working in IB and the work is too time demanding, go to a damn boutique. Not every IB requires 80+ hours a week. I know the whole depressed state makes one feel helpless and probably lose a sense of reality a bit, but you need to know when to throw in the towel - and there's absolutely no shame in that (you're a douche if you think there is)...

"Working insanely hard, long hours can suck sometimes, but life has little purpose or meaning if you aren't pursuing excellence at something." Step outside of the damn box and do what makes you content. There are probably 10 other careers I would pursue right now, and I am sure after being in IB, any analyst can afford to go back to school for a bit and pursue a change, big or small.

Just my two cents, I don't know why everyone gets a boner for IB. It's probably more for the ego than for the thrill - there's not much thrill there.

 

Yeah banking sucks in terms of work-life balance, but you don't succeed without hard work and sacrifice. My friends who did banking out of college were miserable during their stints, but not a single one regrets it. Why? Aside from the money, it allowed them to do more lucrative and interesting work later on, gave them tons of exit opportunities, and a strong network and brand. Their lives have consistently gotten better over the years because of the sacrifice they made early on. That's the nature of life. Suck it up, stop being a whiny bitch, and grind it out.

 
Best Response
MBAGrad2015:
Yeah banking sucks in terms of work-life balance, but you don't succeed without hard work and sacrifice.

Good god, you Americans love your cliches.

A lot of people succeed without hard work or sacrifice, particularly people who are good at sales.

The people who are fixated on the false equation of "hard work + sacrifice = eventual success" in banking are typically the naive analysts and associates stuck on their hamster wheels.

Banking is a meritocracy, but often the definition of "merit" is not what your American myths of boot-strapping, hard work and sacrifice etc schooled you to think.

EDIT:

A major cause of burn out is when naive analysts and associates despair to themselves, "I'm working so hard, why is success not coming to me for my hard work and sacrifice, like the legends promised? DOES NOT COMPUTE!"

It's because your education system and surrounding myths of success convince you to think that if you work hard and sacrifice, you will certainly get to the top. "You go girl!" and all that Oprah Winfrey shit, or its male equivalent (eg "you don't succeed without hard work and sacrifice").

I see plenty of smart kids who aren't smart enough to think around their programming, smashing their heads into the wall of a stalling career, stumbling back, then smashing their heads against the wall again because they adamantly believe HARD WORK + SACRIFICE is the only key to success.

Hard work and sacrifice will get you only so far.

And often, there are faster alternatives to get to the same level of success (although that often means having a lot of natural talent and/or connections).

Dumb-arse persistent belief in high school mythology is not the only cause of career burn out, but it's certainly a big one.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, post threads about how to do it on WSO.
 

Great insight. This exact thing happened to me while consulting, but you vocalized it so much better than I could have.

I worked my ass off in my first two years and got mediocre results and didn't understand why. It was a big factor in my burnout, because I basically felt like "what's the point in trying so hard if no one is noticing?"

Along with the internally driven cause you mentioned (mindset of "hard work + sacrifice = eventual success"), I found that there were also important external causes in the form of senior staff / bosses.

Let me explain further...

When I was an analyst I would get assigned endless amounts of low-visibility grunt work that was disguised as a "great opportunity" coming from people that I didn't even report to. I didn't know it at the time, but I was spending hours and hours each week doing work that was immaterial to my success (e.g. organizing analyst events or helping write research papers). I thought that all of this work would fast-track me for promotion, but in reality the real decision makers (i.e. partners / execs) didn't care about anything not related to making money. My associates/managers/seniors managers were just delegating work that they didn't want to do, regardless of whether or not it was good for my career.

It took me 4 years to figure out this game, but in my last year I worked half as hard and got my best performance ranking because I focused on a few important pieces of work that were "force multipliers" for my career success and politely said no to all the b.s. "great opportunities".

www.worklifefitness.co
 

I feel as though that would dilute the resume value of doing investment banking, turning it from juggling multiple deals/responsibilities to have an explicitly carved out set of tasks that do not encompass the entire process of deal making/trading/advising etc.

Could be wrong though. It could turn this into finance bro daycare.

 

I like the Navy Seals analogy. I think one of the big problems is that people think if they can't make it on Wall St they've failed in life, and the suicides are the extremity of such a thought process. Go fishing, buddy.

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
 
Billy Ray Valentine:
"When somebody commits suicide, it's not because they were working too hard," said one senior Wall Street executive. And there is no evidence that the incidence of suicide by young professionals on Wall Street is higher than in any other industry.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/business/dealboo...

As unfortunate an almost any suicide is, I wholeheartedly agree with the above statements.
 

just googled the suicide rate by profession (the riches . com - so maybe not a reliable source) but financial workers are 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide (they are on the 3d spot after doctors and dentists). So i guess stress is till a big factor here. But if u have a different view, i will be glad to hear it

 

The media will always bite on a story that can feed off people's inner demons - jealousy, disdain, etc. Every time anybody in a high-paying job who's life is supposed to be "all that" does something that doesn't conform to that idea, some journalist will jump at the opportunity to "expose" the "truth" about what everybody else doesn't have. While this guy's death is certainly tragic, we can't toss aside simple traits like logic and common sense just to find a scapegoat. Guy was on drugs and took a combination he couldn't control. Sure, work stress was a factor. But it's more likely that without the drugs he wouldn't have jumped. But without the work stress? We can't know for sure - maybe a bad breakup + drugs would have had the same outcome.

 

I don't know a single person in IB that isn't completely miserable but a choice is a choice. That individual was not forced into IB.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

"In 2014, Thomas moved to Moelis, which he figured would be more prestigious and less bureaucratic than Citigroup. He was hired in May and promoted to associate, a rare feat for someone without an M.B.A. His father says he was well reviewed in December and received a bonus in the $400,000 range, on top of his $100,000 salary."

$400K bonuses for associates at Moelis.......?

 
eggplantpower:

"In 2014, Thomas moved to Moelis, which he figured would be more prestigious and less bureaucratic than Citigroup. He was hired in May and promoted to associate, a rare feat for someone without an M.B.A. His father says he was well reviewed in December and received a bonus in the $400,000 range, on top of his $100,000 salary."

$400K bonuses for associates at Moelis.......?

Moelis is not prestigious that's for sure . Doubt the 500k figure as well

 

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