BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

What I Learned From The Financial Crisis Of 2008

This article is more than 5 years old.

In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace started his commencement speech at Kenyon with a parable:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

In 2008, I realized that story was about me.

“Two Young Fish”

Ten years ago, on a particular September day, like every day before it, I was busy swimming around, unknowingly swimming in seawater that was about to evaporate.   

I vaguely remember sitting in my dorm room at university, doing homework I think, when I got distracted by a text from my parents: Did you see the news about Lehman? What news. My friend, and suitemate at the time, had interned at Lehman that summer, in 2008, and was planning to return full-time. I went to go find her to see what this whole thing was about.

I distinctly remember walking to my friend’s room down the hall and finding her in her room, crouched over her computer, intently watching the screen. I walked over to the edge of her bed to watch with her. Oh my God.

We were both seniors in college, working towards our bachelor's degree in engineering. We were a two of many who had “chosen” the finance track. Choice is a generous term here, we weren’t so much choosing as being herded down that path. Our program was a breeding ground for careers in finance. Our program was phenomenally skilled at bundling its students into attractive packages and handing them over to finance industry on a silver platter. Upon matriculating, we were offered a well-laid plan to follow that path.

Now, watching Lehman’s stock plunge, doing a nosedive straight into bankruptcy, it didn’t take us long to figure out that plan had gone bust. For the first time in our college careers (maybe lives?), we had no plan. We were forced to develop our own plan. We were scheduled to enter the Big Unknown (also known as: Life) in eight months time. And here we were facing this massive tsunami, the financial crisis, threatening to obliterate not only our Life Plan, but the rest of the economy along with it.

A sad September that was. We had spent the last three years working towards an epic pole-vault that would land us into the world of finance, only now we had no landing, just a big gaping hole.

“What The Hell Is Water?” Part 1

I’ve often wondered why we were so fascinated with the finance industry. Here’s what I’ve come up with: for the first two decades of our lives, as ambitious young fish, we were taught to aim-and-fire at any worthy accomplishment. After college, money was an obvious bullseye.

It helped that the university’s interest in alumni donations and its rankings, peer pressure and herd mentality, and the pressure from parents all conspired to make it an attractive bullseye. As far as I could tell, no one was going to argue with the exorbitant pay of finance. Success meant money. Money meant success.

Adam Gopnik in his book, Strangers At The Gate, reflected on New York in the 80s that might as well have been 2009. “Money had pushed every other value aside.” Yes, it had. “Now some thought that money meant everything, that only money had weight in the world. Others thought that now money meant everything.”

(Money = everything) ⋂ (finance = money) ∴ finance = everything. (We were engineers―we lived for logic―and I’m not kidding when I write that it was this straightforward in our heads).

Theory is one thing, practice is another. Finance ≠ everything, it turned out. The financial crisis rendered finance jobs almost obsolete. It obliterated our bullseye. We were left as ambitious 22-year-olds with no clue what to aim for next. We were adrift in the sea of the job market, or whatever was left of it.  

“What The Hell Is Water?” Part 2

In an alternate universe, I probably would have continued down my finance track and woken up one day at 40, wondering what exactly I was doing and why I was wasting my time? The financial crisis forced me, and many others, to confront that truth, one that most people face on a slower timetable. The financial crisis pushed us into the angst-producing territory of trying to figure out what exactly we wanted to do with our lives.

You would be mistaken, though, to think that facing a blank slate was an enjoyable exercise. We had been taught to achieve but never to choose. And now we had to pivot, and fast!, to something else. And whatever that something else was, we had to do it in a much weaker economy. We didn’t want any answer but the right answer.

This is a real appeal of the Finance Life Plan. It was structured, it was comfortable, and because everyone else was doing it, you couldn’t really be wrong. It’s easy to lose yourself in it because it upholds an illusory version of the world, everything that real life is not. In 2008 though, the financial crisis shook me out of that reverie.

At 21, forced to reexamine what I wanted to do, I was lucky enough to quickly realize I had always wanted to write. Creative writing, that is. The last job, by the way, that anyone sane would pursue in the middle of an economic crisis. And I was sane, so I gave that up in favor of working for a so-called secure corporation instead.

But a few years later the economy recovered. And as soon as the obliterated jobs of 2008 were back on the market, and some of us secured them, we weren’t particularly keen on keeping them. Soon, people were quitting right and left, leaving “good” jobs and going in all kinds of directions. It was as if someone had cried break! and we all split at the same time. We didn’t want money from our jobs, we wanted meaning.

This revelation was a bummer. As it turns out, finding meaning is a lot harder than finding money.

We weren’t the first generation to have the revelation but we were perhaps the first to act on it early. The financial crisis had already introduced us to uncertainty and triggered New-Age anxiety. We no longer saw supposedly secure jobs as secure. We could never be too sure when or where the next inflection point would happen. Leaving those jobs was not a particularly big risk.

Generations before ours lived life as a step-wise function. We were propelled into the grey area of life earlier, I think, than many of us would have liked. We were put onto a sloping curve where there was no right and wrong, one which constantly fluctuated like a sinusoidal curve, which you hoped―but were never really sure in the moment―sloped upward.

“How Is The Water?”

See, I’ve now been at this for the last ten years and I still feel like I’ve simultaneously arrived and haven’t yet begun. Gopnik, at about 60 years of age, reassures me that I’m not alone. “[A]lmost 40 years after our arrival in New York I look up and realize I have spent my entire adult life doing exactly what I wanted to do and it still feels as if I hadn’t done it. How this happens I’m not sure, except that I am sure it is a universal emotion: accomplishing something longed for never feels like an accomplishment, only an accommodation….”

How is the water? I’ve often asked myself since the economic snafu. The only answer I found so far, is courtesy of Gopnik. “The truth is that fish don’t really have a theory of water. That’s the truth about fish being out of water; they know two states: fine and ‘Oh my God!’ That’s all fish really know about water….”

That’s all I know, too, about life. I can read my fine-to-ohmygod dial in real time. Ten years after the financial crisis, it reads: fine.


And Also Read:

Why Mark Benioff Bought Time Magazine

How Jeff Bezos Hires Great People

PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi On The Tradeoffs Of Being CEO