Minds turned to ash

Josh Cohen in 1843 Magazine:

When Steve first came to my consulting room, it was hard to square the shambling figure slumped low in the chair opposite with the young dynamo who, so he told me, had only recently been putting in 90-hour weeks at an investment bank. Clad in baggy sportswear that had not graced the inside of a washing machine for a while, he listlessly tugged his matted hair, while I tried, without much success, to picture him gliding imperiously down the corridors of some glassy corporate palace. Steve had grown up as an only child in an affluent suburb. He recalls his parents, now divorced, channelling the frustrations of their loveless, quarrelsome marriage into the ferocious cultivation of their son. The straight-A grades, baseball-team captaincy and Ivy League scholarship he eventually won had, he felt, been destined pretty much from the moment he was born. “It wasn’t so much like I was doing all this great stuff, more like I was slotting into the role they’d already scripted for me.” It seemed as though he’d lived the entirety of his childhood and adolescence on autopilot, so busy living out the life expected of him that he never questioned whether he actually wanted it. Summoned by the bank from an elite graduate finance programme in Paris, he plunged straight into its turbocharged working culture. For the next two years, he worked on the acquisition of companies with the same breezy mastery he’d once brought to the acquisition of his academic and sporting achievements. Then he realised he was spending a lot of time sunk in strange reveries at his workstation, yearning to go home and sleep. When the phone or the call of his name woke him from his trance, he would be gripped by a terrible panic. “One time this guy asked me if I was OK, like he was really weirded out. So I looked down and my shirt was drenched in sweat.”

One day a few weeks later, when his 5.30am alarm went off, instead of leaping out of bed he switched it off and lay there, staring at the wall, certain only that he wouldn’t be going to work. After six hours of drifting between dreamless sleep and blank wakefulness, he pulled on a tracksuit and set off for the local Tesco Metro, piling his basket with ready meals and doughnuts, the diet that fuelled his box-set binges. Three months later, he was transformed into the inertial heap now slouched before me. He did nothing; he saw no one. The concerned inquiries of colleagues quickly tailed off. He was intrigued to find the termination of his employment didn’t bother him. He spoke to his parents in Chicago only as often as was needed to throw them off the scent. They knew the hours he’d been working, so didn’t expect to hear from him all that much, and he never told them anything important anyway.

More here.