by
Carrie Sun
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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
Because I did not know how to get off the call I ended up being late to my three-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapy. When I arrived I talked a mile a minute about how I felt paralyzed by the need to make some big decisions. “I want to quit my life,” I told my therapist. “But I promised him five to ten years. I’ll feel like a total hypocrite if I break my word.”
“You made that promise,” she said, “with all the information available to you then. And now you have new information. You are allowed to change your mind.”
As I made my way to Meru, I thought of Elisabeth, who had called me again after I tried to quit. We talked for ninety minutes. “I get it,” she said. “It’s still the most catty, intense girl-fighting culture, right?” I thought of how Val and Erin were not on speaking terms and avoided each other in the halls. I do not remember what had caused their fallout, but I realized then, with each step I took, that we, the assistants, were not to blame for our infighting. I had thought that maybe Sloane and Courtney were my adversaries—no, it was the Carbon culture that pitted us against one another. We did not share information. Institutional memory was siloed. We had zero standardization across roles (except being in charge of calendars). We received no central messaging. We had no channels to resolve work issues, like how our jobs mean the willingness to do anything at any time and with a smile. The supervisor-feedback form was littered with goes above the call of duty, eager to help, persists, volunteers. We could never say no to our superiors so we said no to one another. Carbon could easily give us more resources and yet we fought over arbitrary limits, like receptionists’ time. Carbon’s executives had told us they did not want us gossiping with one another out of privacy concerns. I now saw this as a cover for the fear of what would happen if we came together and talked.