Would you die for your work?
Seeing people like Harry Houdini who died performing, or Marie Curie, whose revolutionary work on radioactivity would cause her death, is romantic portrayal of pursuing passion to the ultimate degree.
But what about dying because of your work? The lesser sung deaths of those blindly lead to demise by fruitless pursuits of achievement are less romantic.
Thomas Hughes and Sarvshreshth Gupta — both analysts working on Wall Street, both dead before their 30th birthdays from suicide.
However, if you asked their fathers, they would maintain their sons were killed by their stressful jobs.
That’s the lifestyle on Wall Street though: long hours, big money and hard drugs. While some say working too hard doesn’t drive you to suicide, other companies are striving for employees to find a work life balance in response to the rash of recent deaths.
When I came across a New York Times article examining Wall Street’s deathly culture, I couldn’t help but to think of my recent column about the toxic culture of busy.
These suicides provide a potent, albeit extreme, example of how far some will go in their quest for meaningless success.
This isn’t to say the success from these men who tragically lost their lives was a waste, but what was it all worth when it forces parents to bury a son?
You’re probably thinking Wall Street analysts are not a fair representation of the population. However, just like Thomas Hughes using cocaine to stay awake for his grueling job, there are students on LSU’s campus who use drugs to stay awake and cram for a test.
Just like Gupta calling his parents and complaining about his workload hours before jumping to his death, students here will call their moms to cry their hearts out because making a C might be the difference between looking in the mirror and seeing future medical school student or a failure.
We’ve become so caught up in our hunt for success, we start to resemble a dead oak tree, looking strong and sturdy on the outside, but the inside is weakening and rotting away.
Some turn to Adderall or Vyvanse prescriptions to fight away the demons. Some pick up street drugs, while others play the duplicity game telling everyone they are okay when nothing feels that way.
Like the frog who stays in the incrementally heating water until it’s boiled alive, we let stress weigh us down little by little until it becomes an unrelenting hurricane that blows the dead oak tree over.
If we took a moment to assess ourselves, we might just realize how much stress is self-inflicted. Why do we think we have to be number one in our class, president of three clubs and social chair of our Greek organization?
I know why. It’s because we all want to take the world by storm after college, do something meaningful and be somebody. We think to make our mark on the world we must be like the Silicon Valley billionaires who are connecting the world through websites made in dorm rooms.
Maybe we should realize doing something meaningful doesn’t mean influencing the world at large, rather influencing our world around us — the people we interact with and the hobbies we enjoy.
Ask any successful working mother and I guarantee she will say her greatest achievement is her family. No one on their deathbed regretted choosing family and friends over work.
But we’re young and ambitious. I don’t want to think that I change my friend’s life by being supportive or that I make my parents day by calling them. I want to cure cancer, discover aliens and create the next world-changing invention. So we fall into the trap of placing success above all else.
We realize we don’t spend as much time on fun activities as we used to, and our relationships begin to suffer. We realize we don’t make time for ourselves anymore because we’re always busy. Then we realize we don’t laugh as much as we used to because our desires have engulfed us.
Sometimes, possibly like the two tragic Wall Street suicides, we realize this in the middle of a 20-story free fall.
Jay Cranford is a 21-year-old finance senior from St. Simons Island, Georgia. You can reach him on Twitter @hjcranford.