Beware Goldman workhorses, deferred gratification is the worst kind

I had to double-check that there are 100 hours in a week. In much-leaked representations to their employer, junior bankers at Goldman Sachs purported to spend approximately that much time at work. Their woes (“my anxiety levels are through the roof”) would not move an Engels. There will be no treatise on The Condition of the Forex Class in Moorgate. Still, for those of us who have struck what might be called a life-life balance, these testimonies of toil could be dispatches from Mars.

Yes, the graduates knew the deal when they joined, but the appeal to free will is an argument against almost any labour standards whatever. Nine-year-old Victorian chimney sweeps knew the deal. As for all the talk of character-forging, of battle-hardening: to what end, exactly? The point of a corporate career arc is that work becomes more strategic, less frenzied over time. The early hazing should not be passed off as a kind of Spartan agoge.

If it wasn’t for the effort, I could argue against hard work all day, even as it feels like arguing against stultifying peace in 1913. If artificial intelligence fulfils its promise, bankers, but also Amazon staff, the Uber precariat and other burden-bearers of the day will stand relieved in due course, as will almost all of us. How to find meaning in leisure will at that point become the human predicament.

Until then, graduates, courted by banks and the like, might not resent a pointer or two from the generation above. Mine is to think very hard before trading the reality of present hardships for notional joys down the line.

Drink, sex and travel are among the pleasures that call on energies that peak exactly as graduate bankers are wasting them on work

The ageing process — as I have lived it, as I have observed it in friends — has convinced me of one thing above all. The deferral of gratification is the easiest life mistake to make. And by definition among the least reversible. A unit of leisure is not worth nearly as much in late or even middle age as it is in one’s twenties. To put it in Goldman-ese, the young should discount the future more sharply than prevailing sentiment suggests.

The first reason should be obvious enough, at least after the past 12 months. There is no certainty at all of being around to savour any hard-won spoils. The career logic of an investment banker (or commercial lawyer, or junior doctor) assumes a normal lifespan, or thereabouts. And even if a much-shortened one is an actuarial improbability, a sheer physical drop-off in the mid-thirties is near-certain. Drink, sex and travel are among the pleasures that call on energies that peak exactly as graduate bankers are wasting them on work.

Then there is the real drag on mid-life fun: the accretion of dependants and responsibilities. Some (spouses, children) can be swerved, according to preference. Others (infirm parents) are a matter of luck. Taken together, even a thirty-something can be circumscribed in a way that his or her slightly younger self would have struggled to anticipate. What stands out about contemporaries who took the 100-hour week route is the gap between their economic power to enjoy life and their effective freedom to do so. They don’t even have a trove of raucous memories by way of consolation.

Of course, it is do-able for a junior banker to live long, slow down not a tad and shun all personal commitments and burdens into the bargain. But even that leaves one last barrier, more mental than material, between them and middle-aged El Dorado.

The enjoyment of life is a skill. The idea that it can be switched on after decades at the grindstone underrates the force of human habit. Thinking of the retired or semi-retired workhorses I know, it is telling how structured and deliberate their recreations tend to be. The wine venture, the competitive sailing, the art-dealing: these are corporate-style projects by another name. The talent for doing nothing, for succumbing to the moment, was never developed. Perhaps this is what “born” A-type personalities would be doing anyway. Just as likely, it is the conditioning that starts with those 20-hour days as impressionable youths. If so, Goldman’s alleged snowflakes are understating their case. Pleasures deferred can be pleasures foregone.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com