IBD juniors are just a bunch of pampered kids

Who exactly is saying investment banking is exhausting?

After 1.5 years, I genuinely feel zero pressure at this job. Most of my colleagues are smart and pleasant — going to work every day is actually enjoyable.

Sure, we regularly grind until 4-5am, but who can’t pull late nights? That’s hardly impressive.

This is the easiest job for numbing your brain. It requires zero thinking, yet comes with a brand name. It looks grueling from the outside, so when randos ask what you do, you get to dramatically say “finance” like it’s some burden.

Real responsibility and self-discipline means managing your own downtime. But our hours (basically no off switch) conveniently excuse us from ever thinking about ourselves or society. We save our lazy side for ourselves and only show our “hustle” face to the boss.

We don’t need to think about humanities, international relations, write a well-argued essay, be creative, or use actual intelligence to derive anything. We just need to sit under AC being good students, or follow the well-worn path — grind PeakFramework, recruit for PE. Zero big-picture thinking required. Just follow instructions and you’re done.

As for the actual work? Linking a few cells, adding circular switches, building some scenarios — we call that “technical exposure.” Walking a client through a few Excel rows on a corp dev Zoom — we call that “client-facing opportunities.” Meanwhile the genuinely brain-burning intellectual challenges we studied advanced math or philosophy for? Nobody’s rushing to grab those when they appear.

IBD is a group of young people who won’t admit they feel superior, yet are completely coddled. The hours happen to be terrible, so the media victimizes us — but it masks the fact that we face zero real pressure, need zero intelligence, and zero communication skills. And we’ve bought into the story that we’re exhausted.

Watching Jennifer Aniston’s character in The Morning Show wake up at 3:30am every day with nowhere to hide as a public figure — that’s pressure we greenhouse flowers can’t even fathom.

Seeing a window cleaner hanging hundreds of meters up at midnight — that’s actual danger.

The real estate agent showing me apartments needs sharper people-reading skills and more client interaction than I’ll ever have. An Instagram influencer has stronger information synthesis and output skills than us.

Working in banking in this go-with-the-flow environment has given me an excuse I didn’t even realize I was using — to avoid truly thinking about my life and taking real ownership of it.