For every college senior

While I was abroad last semester, I had the pleasure of spending a week in Paris with several friends. One day we decided to make a trip up to Normandy to see the American cemetery at Omaha Beach, where the majority of Allied forces landed on D-Day. What I didn’t realize was just how profound an experience it would be walking through the rows of crosses and down on the actual beach.

Here lay 4,000 kids 18 and 19 years of age, from every religion and walk of life, who just so happened, as it were, to draw the generational short straw but instead said “fuck it, let’s roll.” An obelisk monument bears witness to this: 550 Rangers bears tasked with erecting ladders tall enough to allow infantrymen a chance at neutralizing the myriad turrets dotting the embankment… contemporary accounts recall soldiers shielding those behind them with their bodies as bullets rained down on them, and when one was killed, the other right behind him threw his body off the embankment and took his place securing ropes. I walked down on the beach, and sure enough the first scene of Saving Private Ryan materialized around me as I imagined the hell that had played out on June 6. Any soldier on the U-boats who made it to shore had over 250 paces (I counted) to run before he reached any sort of cover. To be sure, we Americans have a distinct stereotype around the world, but this small plot of land on the shores of the English Channel prove we will always be viewed with a tinge of awe and wonder at the net positive effect we’ve had on this world, for “if ever there were proof we fought for a cause and not for conquest, it could be found in these cemeteries: all we asked… was enough soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”

My roommates told me two years ago their finance professor started an intro course by asking the class what they thought was the most important word in finance. The answer, to which no one came close: “time.” Time and any chance at opportunity in this world were never given to these men, but they gave us a world order conducive to globalization, US dollar hegemony, and a privileged position in the world of finance. May we never forget that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

So for all of us enjoying our last semester before graduating to “analyst” or whatever your life calling might be, that’s a lesson more important than any learned in the classroom or on the job: (as a high school classmate of mine wrote in the Yale Daily News) “that long after we’ve forgotten most of what we learned at college, we’ll remember the people with whom we spent ‘the shortest, gladdest years of life’; that time passed with friends is never wasted time; that these years are only really successful if enjoyed.”

I ended up writing this in response to Sam Polk’s op-ed in the NYT. Looking back on that trip and on my abroad experience, I can’t help but appreciate what a massive privilege we all have to travel, more or less fool around in college for four years, and ride the tails of cumulative advantage to the helms of business and statecraft. I think we all owe it to posterity and to the men interred on that hallowed ground to make of our lives—our immensely privileged lives—something maybe a little greater and worthy of their sacrifice than just solely “for the love of money.”