Especially on Wall Street where those things can be variable.
Once money becomes the sole measure, people get tempted to spend all those hours in pursuit of money. They could die in a car crash at 27 having spent their entire lives "paying their dues" in the money-driven system.
IMHO this is also the result of having monolithic "global" capitals, which pits people on a very steep ladder of success.
Does anyone remember that article by Ezekiel Emanuel - Rahm Emanuel's brother - in which he claimed he wanted to die at 75 (or at least persuade the rest of the little people that they should want to die at 75...). His reason's were roughly that he might become disabled and he hadn't been selected for the Nobel prize.
Let's break that down.
1) The Emanuels seem to be living in a fishbowl in which your life doesn't count for anything once you have a disability. There's no compensating factors, no possibilities of intellectual or cultural contribution after your body becomes "disabled" somehow. Methinks that doesn't refer to Ezekiel at all: rather that's code for people "on Disability", whom Ezekiel views as useless eaters contributing to overpopulation, and who are highly unlikely to be hidden geniuses. Those people should relieve the taxpayer of their financially burdensome selves and off themselves at age 75. With messages like these, is suicide all that surprising?
2) Ah, the Nobel Prize: that's not just recognition of your genius - it means you won a sort of status struggle and popularity contest among your peers. A lot of politicking goes into that, and the Nobel Prize amounts to a credential that money will follow. Folks who didn't get the Nobel Prize didn't cut it in the status struggle: they should accept they were weeded out by offing themselves at 75. After all, if they were worth anything to society, they would have been crowned with status and money a lot earlier.
Someone really should enlighten Ezekiel about all the race and class privilege packed into his thinking.
Anyway, on a global stage, everyone is a small fish in a big pond. The US system is especially vicious about forcing people to work without a safety net. Suicide is almost demanded as the cost of failure if you set yourself in a financially-driven status-system.
Or...we could, as a society, decide to make some changes by enforcing limits to workdays and providing a universal mincome so at least the consequence of failure isn't homelessness. We could always replace at least half our cumbersome and expensive poverty bureaucracy - which mainly serves to keep poor people poor and demoralized and under surveillance - with simple and direct hiring programs. What a thought! Give unemployed people jobs instead of employing a lot of people to be patronizing to longterm unemployed people!
Well, those are my thoughts. It's late, so I apologize if they are meandering.
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