By SAM POLK
IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million —
and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no
children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted
more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was
addicted.
Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at
Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I
wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what
wealth meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker”
how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a
trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I think
about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and
distributed, when fortunes are made.
I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad.
He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed
to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a
million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold
kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck
off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.
Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so
did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the
glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with
enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter
plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked
as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this
video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich.
IT was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I
was competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at Columbia University — I was also
a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and
ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my
getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet
company for fistfighting. I learned about rage from my dad, too. I can still
see his red, contorted face as he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the
C.S.F.B. internship by omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was
determined not to blow what seemed a final chance. The only thing as important
to me as that internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia
volleyball team. But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d
sometimes end up with other women.
Three weeks into my internship she wisely dumped me. I don’t
like who you’ve become, she said. I couldn’t blame her, but I was so devastated
that I couldn’t get out of bed. In desperation, I called a counselor whom I had
reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help.
She helped me see that I was using alcohol and drugs to
blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That
began some of the hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in
my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked open, exposing my heart to
air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an
underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it. C.S.F.B. didn’t offer
me a full-time job, and I returned, distraught, to Columbia for senior year.
After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the
grace of a managing director willing to take a chance on a kid who had called
him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was
sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled
to receive a $40,000 bonus. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to
check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was
only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my
initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew
excited at how much money was available.
Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to
move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader,
one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I
started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75
million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating
a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month.
I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in
Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one
of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with
unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game
just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction
wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and
successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.
Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits
together, from interns to managing directors. When the guy next to you makes
$10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet. Nonetheless, I was
thrilled with my progress.
My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be
using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel
powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating
more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that
was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.
Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant
fireball of greed. I’d think about how my colleagues could buy Micronesia if
they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have money;
they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to
their offices. They were royalty.
I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in
the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus —
$40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was
paid “only” $1.5 million.
But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses
who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with
one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new
hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad
idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went
quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t
have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned
with is how this affects our company.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of
losing money, despite all that he had.
From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new
eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for
limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the
mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that
threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up
his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get
a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out,
the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the
heroin runs out.
I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more
than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I
made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t
fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable
talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives
trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit
derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal
now seemed deeply distorted.
I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series
on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the
image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob
had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the
‘60s, I would have been on that bus.
But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices
out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault
epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in
the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d
made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the
world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to
help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million
dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my
girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right.
Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.
Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and
playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid
the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction
imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically
responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great
country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity
between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a
wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation —
including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did
in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how
to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of
millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole
that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.
DESPITE my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to
leave. I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses.
More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel
like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What
made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving.
In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million
instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to
stay several more years. Instead, I walked away.
The first year was really hard. I went through what I can
only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of
money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten
promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough
money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still
hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets.
In the three years since I left, I’ve married, spoken in
jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing
class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called
Groceryships to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction.
I am much happier. I feel as if I’m making a real contribution. And as time
passes, the distortion lessens. I see Wall Street’s mantra — “We’re smarter and
work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money” — for what it is:
the rationalization of addicts. From a distance I can see what I couldn’t see
then — that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of
people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.
I was lucky. My experience with
drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction.
The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself
that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self
to walk away.
Dozens of different types of 12-step
support groups — including Clutterers Anonymous and On-Line Gamers Anonymous —
exist to help addicts of various types, yet there is no Wealth Addicts
Anonymous. Why not? Because our culture supports and even lauds the addiction.
Look at the magazine covers in any newsstand, plastered with the faces of
celebrities and C.E.O.'s; the superrich are our cultural gods. I hope we all
confront our part in enabling wealth addicts to exert so much influence over
our country.
I generally think that if one is
rich and believes they have “enough,” they are not a wealth addict. On Wall
Street, in my experience, that sense of “enough” is rare. The money guy doing a
job he complains about for yet another year so he can add $2 million to his $20
million bank account seems like an addict.
I recently got an email from a
hedge-fund trader who said that though he was making millions every year, he
felt trapped and empty, but couldn’t summon the courage to leave. I believe
there are others out there. Maybe we can form a group and confront our
addiction together. And if you identify with what I’ve written, but are
reticent to leave, then take a small step in the right direction. Let’s create
a fund, where everyone agrees to put, say, 25 percent of their annual bonuses
into it, and we’ll use that to help some of the people who actually need the
money that we’ve been so rabidly chasing. Together, maybe we can make a real
contribution to the world.
* Sam Polk is a former hedge-fund
trader and the founder of the nonprofit Groceryships. This article
was published by Tbe New York Times on January 18, 2014
