How do you convince people this isn’t slave labour and you chose this career path?
People constantly ask me why I would work this job, and act like this is forced upon on us. How do you tell people that you are just a psychopath?
... do you understand what "slave labor" means? Assuming you work in finance, you get paid an obscene amount of money to do something of almost no value. What more explanation does someone want? You'd do better to ask that question of someone who works a few less hours but for a fraction of the pay at a nonprofit or something
“Something of almost no value”?
Do you even understand how finance works?
Very well. Having been a junior IB analyst, I also know that most of my time was spent on pitch decks and running the same models over and over with minute changes. There is a reason users on this site are referred to as "monkeys"
More to the point, finance can have value, there is certainly an accretive effect to directing capital flows to needy enterprises, but I would argue that the pay for such work is completely out of whack to the intrinsic value of the work, and that finance professionals are certainly overpaid (even relatively) compared to the value of a job like a teacher or EMT. But the "almost no value" was more directed towards junior folks, since I got the strong impression that the OP is someone starting out in their career.
I'm pretty sure all of the founders I have raised capital for so they can grow their business and those of the businesses I've sold so they can retire and enjoy their lives or go on to start other businesses would disagree. Many of those businesses providing great value to our society as a whole.
Right... but those businesses provided value. You helped that business by finding them the capital they needed to grow, which is a service for sure, but that is why I used the modifier "almost."
Also, the founders "you" raised capital for? You did this personally? Or your firm did? And if it was you firm, what was your role in all those transactions? Did you go out to the market and raise the money, or did your MD while you helped create nice-looking pitch books? I don't mean that accusatorily, because perhaps you did do the raise yourself - but certainly many other people in your company were working on the less productive part of selling your services, rather than raising and allocating the capital.
And whether the founders of you helped would agree with you is almost immaterial. SBF is going to get out of jail with more money than he could possibly spend... but that doesn't mean FTX created anything of value or had a net positive impact on the world. We shouldn't make the mistake of correlating wealth with doing something of value, as the tech boom of the last decade shows us all too clearly. It can be correlated, and arguably mostly is, but there are more than enough outliers that it is nowhere close to a general rule.
Just stop talking about your job. Problem solved
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