The soul of a finance bro
The San Francisco business district, photo by Caleb George on Unsplash
While pursuing an MBA, I had a run in with a young man seeking his fortune in high finance. He did not like that I, a woman without Wall Street cred, was chosen as a TA for a course on private equity that was run in partnership with the Cornell Endowment Fund. He aired his grievance publicly: I was unqualified.
The role involved picking up men—they were all men—at the Ithaca airport where they flew in on private jets, dining with them at the Statler’s upscale restaurant run by Cornell Hotelies, and performing administrative tasks that MBAs refer to as liaising. No financial wizardry. No spreadsheet jockeying. Just old-fashioned access—the thing the finance bro coveted and I entertained with mild curiosity. I was qualified, but I was insecure enough to care what the guy said about me. Our professor swatted him away like a gnat.
A couple weeks into the semester, I locked eyes with the finance bro in a place I did not expect to find him. He sat in a pew across the aisle from me at a Catholic Mass. I was surprised—though I don’t know why I should have been—that he was Catholic. I hadn’t imagined he had any interests or thoughts beyond discounted cash flows, Johnnie Walker Blue, and becoming filthy rich. He might have been there at his girlfriend’s behest. But in his eyes, I saw a glimmer. Maybe he was a seeker of something our MBA program couldn’t offer?
After business school, I returned to the Bay Area, which had been home since my undergraduate years. My corporate office was on the 20th floor of the building across the street from the iconic Transamerica Pyramid.
The building’s best feature was a rooftop gym. It was small—a couple treadmills, a bike, a set of free weights, and an outdoor track that encircled the gym and the HVAC for the building. Most days, I’d watch the sun set while I ran those short laps, again and again. With each lap, I witnessed the day slipping away, darkness descending slowly and then all at once. After stopping to pick up something to eat and walking to my Nob Hill apartment, it would be time for bed.
Working all the time was the norm, and I wasn’t doing anything extreme like pounding cans of Rockstar and sleeping under my desk. I was just another corporate lackey with a comfortable salary and a meaningful bonus and the promise of stock options, attached to my phone on nights and weekends, drinking too much, but otherwise producing, always producing.
I was not unhappy in San Francisco. Stuff happened, but most of what felt painful or exhilarating to me at the time now seems too banal to chronicle. Lying awake in bed one night, I looked up at the wall behind me, out of habit, because in my childhood bedroom, a crucifix hung above my bed. The crucifix didn’t travel with me when I left home. But somehow it was there on that wall, an artifact of my childhood—my religious inheritance. Other experiences were there as well—my dad reciting the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be with me every night, a sojourn in the Holy Lands, the arangathrum of my 14-year-old best friend, who is Hindu. Perhaps the wall was God. Or, God was there. Or something less mysterious—my inner life? Finally, I saw myself, running around in circles on the rooftop of a skyscraper, the darkness descending on my days, over and over, ad infinitim, and somehow I knew to quit.
I left San Francisco for Iowa City, where I’ve lived and worked as a writer for over a decade now. Turns out the finance bro had been right. I did not belong in his world.
The Weight by Jeff Boyd, a criminally underread fever dream of a novel, follows a newly divorced twenty-something named Julian, as he breaks from his Christian upbringing to “come of age” in Portland, Oregon. He’s in a band, so the novel is a romp through the secular altars of young-adult life—sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll—and the ensuing conflicts. Then, in the denouement, Julian looks at his buddy, sees through their racial and class divisions and male theatrics, and instead of waxing on about friendship, or love, or music, he thinks: He has a soul. The book instantly takes on a spiritual valence because the recognition of his frenemy’s soul is the manifestation of Julian’s religious inheritance.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I couldn’t quite see in the dark, glassy eyes of the finance bro sitting in the pew across from me all those years ago. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was looking at an empath with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex or Patrick Bateman himself. Despite the ecclesiastical setting, I was unable to tap into my own religious inheritance deeply enough to look at my enemy and think: He has a soul.
I don’t know if that guy makes the big bucks in private equity now, if his Connecticut mansion has a five-car garage. Probably. Maybe he’s still belittling people, in more consequential ways. But I think he has a soul.
Anna Bruno’s novel Fine Young People is available for pre-order here.
