When I was in banking, I lost nearly £17,000 spread betting on the Goldman Sachs SEC trial. I lost another gut wrenching chunk of money in Vegas playing poker with the big boys. Sucks right? But "life is long, I'll win it back".

And so I went on, and yes, from time to time I also made healthy profits spread betting and gambling, if ever there was a difference. From time to time, I still dabble. The truth is I'd been gambling all the way through my late teens and through university, in fact more than half the draw to banking was the 'make a fast buck' appeal of it. The rush of free money, of free surplus, of sudden rockstar freedom.

WHY BOTHER BEING GOOD?

Everyday the newspaper tells the same depressing stories. Youth crime, corporate tax-avoidance, dishonest lawyers, selfish bankers, mass genocide, needless wars, countless violent acts of extreme hatred, rape, oppression and corruption, right down to the cheating footballer’s wife, as told in the lying gossip magazine.

I don’t read the tabloids too much. I’ve come to realise that when people hear over and over, day after day, about bad things, it seems that they start to think that they are justified in being a little less noble themselves. ‘That’s just the world we live in’ – ‘everyone’s taking drugs’, ‘everyone cheats’, ‘everyone gossips’. The media makes celebrities of the worst of us, and subsequently, over time, people feel excused to drift into moral grey areas, asking ‘Why bother being good when everyone else is bad?’. Well if we can’t answer that question, we’re heading for a very dark world indeed, and so that’s the question I want to answer in this article. Why bother being good?

I was one of those high school seniors that posted on WallStreetOasis in the ye olde days when it was known as ibankingoasis.com, and well, despite my earlier enthusiasm for the job, I decided to quit this week.

I wanted to both share my story and get some guidance/perspective from the community.

Me:

Top bucket second year analyst at a large investment bank (RBC, Wells, etc) in one of their best groups. No buyside offer, but was in later stage interviews with a few large, well-known hedge funds. A few older analysts have placed well, and I was not concerned about my exit options.

Why I Quit:

Like a majority of people who are on this website, I used to come on here and write bullshit about a life partly my own, partly fantasy. I'm now going to uncloak the anonymous man and tell you my story.

My name is Stephen Ridley. I graduated from a top tier British University with a First Class Honours Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 2010 and went straight into IBD at a top tier European Investment Bank, after interning there in 2009. I worked in the top team (on a revenue basis) for 16 months, before quitting in October 2011. I want to tell you about that experience, and about what has happened since then, about how I left the green to chase my dream. This will be blunt and honest. I do not mean to offend, quite the opposite, I hope to inspire! Again, this isn't an attack on those who choose to be bankers, it's just me sharing my experience together with the lessons I've learnt, and hopefully it speaks to a few people. If you look at the picture above you'll see a picture of what I do now. It's a little different from where I was 6 months ago!

Banking is fucking brutal. I knew this after my internship, but I didn't care. I wanted money. I wanted respect. I wanted to be a somebody in the eyes of myself and others. But most of all, I wanted money. Why? Because money is freedom. Money means I can wear what I want, live where I want, go where I want, eat what I want, be who I want. Money would make me happy. Right? Well... not exactly I'm afraid. In fact, money didn't seem to make any of the bankers happy. Not one person in the roughly 200 I got to know in banking were happy. Yet all earned multiples of the national average salary.

Hi Fellow Monkeys,

I am trying to build up a list of resources for everyone on Wall Street Oasis to share. As I look at the forum, there are a lot of resources on getting a job in Finance. I believe that everyone is attracted to Finance, other than having a genuine interest in the market, is to obtain happiness. To most of us, we have somewhat of a notion that money can solve majority of our problems.

To me, to be happy, requires a holistic approach at looking at every part of life and slowly improving all areas: wealth, career (Wall Street Oasis is in this area), health, spiritual (hobby) and relationship (dating, family). It took me a year to look into all types of books and websites and I have complied this list so far.

I'm confused.

I used to post on here a couple of years ago, most of what I posted was bullsh*t. The truth is I was in my final year at university, I'd just done an internship, wasn't sure how I felt about it as a prospective life, and I wanted to play banker on the internet to test the water a bit.

To cut a long story short, I ended up going into banking, and I'm now about to become a second year analyst in IBD at a BB in London. This has been a very very tough year. If I could give some genuine pros and cons of my experiences in banking;

Pros

Sat at your desk, getting texts from off old friends, and girls you could've got on, who are out partying just a couple of blocks from you.

Sat at your desk, falling asleep, feeling the emotional, physical and mental pain of yet another all nighter.

Sat at your desk, hating yourself for being so driven by the artificialities of prestige and money, whilst everyone else is out there living their few precious years with a happiness you can't even understand enough to properly envy.

You're tired, you're sure you're knocking years of you're life expectancy, you're in agony, and can't stop focusing on that extra weight that's started to accumulate.

Then you start to dream...

I could've been an entrepeneur, I could've been a musician, I could've opened up that little salsa bar, I could've just travelled the world, using whatever job I find in one place to fund the move to the next. I could've applied to wealth management (they all go home at 7pm and have 0 stress). I wish I banged my best friend at university (who was a girl! and smoking hot). I miss the intimacy of a relationship. I miss getting regular sleep and being home in time to go grab a beer with my friends.

Bankers are among the smartest people in the world, though so easily manipulated. Why is it that as soon as graduates enter banking, they suddenly feel so inadequate that they change everything about themselves. We are meant to be the movers and the shakers of the developed world, yet a vast majority of us are so easily manipulated that we will do anything if someone calls it prestigious.

I used to judge people on what they did; I respected bankers just for being bankers, I respected barristers for being barristers, and so on. I attatched value and respect to prestige. Prestige is nothing more than the value system and dogma of other people. After sitting on this website, hearing countless analysts bitch and moan about how their job, after sitting in my IBD office and seeing 75% of the people miserable and lifeless, I have come to realise why I respect people.

So what is happiness? Is it a series of chemical reactions in your brain brought about by arbitrary worldly phenomena? Does it lie in your external portrayal to the world, through either your fame or degree of wealth? Or perhaps, is it much deeper than that?

if you think for a second of social conventions and think of the human consciousness, there is an extreme lack of relevance between the two. On the one hand, social conventions are the result of arbitrary interactions and the interconnection between humans and their subsequent development throughout human history. On the other hand, human consciousness, like the waves of the ocean is a part of nature. It is a universal concept and it can only be illuminated from within, for our consiousness lies within us and no where else.