by
Carrie Sun
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More rhetorical questions: Vince, the president and CEO of a major New York cultural institution, courted Boone through a warm intro. The institution needed money for renovations; it was hoping to better conserve its collection. Vince invited Boone to private tours and special dinners, all of which we turned down. “Why does Vince keep inviting me to things?” Boone asked. I think he wants your support, I said. It must have been obvious I was pushing my interests—creativity, learning; I wanted us to support the institution so I always floated Vince’s asks straight to the top. Vince asked, again, if Boone wanted a tour. “At Carbon,” Boone said, “we’re trying hard to build the future. Why would I give any money to the preservation of the past?”
oof
ALL I WANTED when I was a child was for my parents to pay attention to me. They did not have time to play with me, certainly never during the week, so I spent my time playing by myself, flipping through my mom’s GRE books, doing logic puzzles, reading, planning, and waiting for Saturdays. I would beg my parents to take me out. Anywhere. I did not care—laundry, groceries, post office, though something preferably not errands. I loved our local zoo and children’s garden. “Saturday I’ll take you,” Mom would sometimes reply at night after an extra-long day, during which she cooked, cleaned, worked, studied, and often sewed new clothes for me from fabrics she had bought on sale. Saturday morning would come. I’d jump out of bed.
“Mommy! What time are we going to the zoo?”
Silence.
“Mommy?”
Silence.
“Mom? You said you would take me to the zoo today—”
“We’re not going.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“But why don’t you want to?”
“No reason!” I could not understand why she was getting mad and shouting at me when she was the one who broke her word. “Stop bothering me!”
im sorry but this is so boring
Mom used that phrase again: tīnghuà. Which means listen words. Obedient. Submissive. The first time I told her I felt controlled in my relationship with Josh, she had said to me, “Good. You’re a wild child. You need a man to tame you.” I could not understand why she had seemed partial to Josh till now: it was not Josh whom she liked but who I had been when I was with him.
girl just like cut her off it's fine
I used to look away from the television whenever a player was injured on the field. I told myself it was not part of the game, the clock was not running. I was wrong. The clock is always running. As Saban just said, there is no off-season, and there are no off minutes. So you don’t get to play without acknowledging the harm, the trauma, the burnout. The challenge of keeping on becomes about endurance, and some of the best ways to endure are to compartmentalize the inconvenient, sublimate the pain, and forget the past. All my life I had been trying to right my mindset—had even gotten good at justifying the systems in which I found myself—in order to keep on. But this was a defense, a reflex, a coping mechanism; it was not who I was or who I aspired to be.
I have hit rock bottom. I eat normally at work every morning, but then, in the afternoons, I continue my habit of cupcake-sundae deliveries and later go home and close the door and rid myself of myself. I don’t remember when it began. Probably sometime in the past two months when every minute of every day I’ve wished to leave my life behind. I am materials rich and agency poor: I feel starved of freedom, starved of the ability to do the self-constitutive activities that would make me me—so I feed myself, fill up and up and up. I have a set of memories with the same notes: turn on both hot and cold faucets because I hate the sound of my habits; purge; look over to the window where the dead orchids are sitting because I can’t bear to throw them away (I’m hoping they’ll spring back to life); purge again; brush my teeth; look at the moss and succulents in my terrarium and think of how they are still alive by being in a glass cage. I’ve gained thirty-six pounds since the start of Carbon. I can walk. But not run. I can’t work out. Sometimes I will chew and spit. This will happen at the office with Dang Coconut Chips, but only in the afternoons when shit gets so crazy that all I want to do is—this is the word I’ve been typing to Parmita—die. No item in my wardrobe fits me anymore, so I wear only Rent the Runway dresses. My bruxism has returned. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can’t cry.
maybe the most harrowing part of the book lol
Adjust the size of the bets.
I must change my life.
cool!
I put my own needs aside for Carbon and Boone because I had believed that serving my employer meant serving humanity. I had believed in the prestige of Carbon, which, to me, lay not in any zeros after commas but in the moral legitimacy of the enterprise. I ignored the fact that individual portfolio managers at Carbon used individual private jets. I ignored how each of those private jets contributed to climate change and government revenue shortfalls via tax breaks. I ignored the carried interest loophole. I ignored the fact that many middle-class workers paid more in taxes, percentage-wise, than hedge fund managers or private equity execs. I ignored the very real privileges of everyone, including me, working at Carbon, how people treated us differently, how they tripped over one another to make our lives easier: they answered our calls; we jumped the queues; they gave us discounts and freebies and—what killed me—they saved their best behavior for us.
Something was wrong with this setup. I knew it. I think he did too.
Boone harbored no illusions about the game. This was, perhaps, his ultimate genius. I saw how the belief that the game was about more than just money was my fallacy, not his. I had fallen for his diversions, those repeated instructions to be “super nice” and “thoughtful” and “kind” and to “give first.” I had fallen for them most readily because a large part of me was motivated to believe the lie, the myth—that a big, powerful crossover fund could care about something else, something greater, like morality or being a net positive to society; that the financial system could be fair and driven by something other than greed and self-interest. I used to think that Boone was driven by a love of the game, whatever the game was, and that making money was a side effect. No. There was only money. Everything else was a side effect.
Money can solve nearly everything.
Nearly everything. The real enemy of a hedge or venture or crossover fund was any person who was not in the room and who could not be persuaded to want to be in the room. Put differently: someone who could not be fueled by money.
goals lol
The rain had stopped. But the air was still wet. The venue felt like a deserted schoolyard. No kids, barely any adults. The paint on the tugboat and crop-duster planes looked dull and faded and the gardens had a revolting quality to it, a place where clowns, balloon twisters, popcorn scoopers, and other low-wage workers readied themselves and forced smiles to entertain absent plutocrats. I looked up at the gray sky and felt hope. Clouds spread the light and softened the rays so that no one on the ground today would have to walk in the shadows of Billionaires’ Row.
i kinda like it