"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.

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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.