To What End?

Alex ("Dre")

July 25, 2018

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This morning, like every morning for the past four weeks and every morning for the next six weeks, I wake up at 6:30am and get ready for work. I am working in downtown New York City and live in the suburbs (though some New Yorkers might call it “upstate”), so it takes me an hour and some to get to the office. Tonight, I’ll come back home around 8pm, get dinner, hang out for a while, go to sleep and then repeat this routine. I actually like it. It gives my day a lot of structure, though I’d definitely enjoy a few more hours of free time, that’s for sure. But my free time, or lack thereof, is not what I want to talk about here. Rather, I want to talk about what happens every day on my commute to and from work.

Watching the men and women on the train, all dressed in white and black clothes, fascinates me. It sometimes feels as if we’re soldiers in an army of workers, like in the Hunger Games. My first day of work epitomized this jarring experience. When I get off the train, I need to walk through a long hallway to exit the station, and usually there is a voice on a speaker shouting travel updates. I had my headphones on the first day, so I couldn’t quite understand what the person speaking was saying. The words floated over my head as I walked in a straight line amongst people that were dressed the same as I was, walking in the same direction as I was, and all looking down. It felt very dystopian, like we were a swarm getting our daily work instructions from a controlling authoritarian government.

Since then, I’ve been introspecting a lot on my commute and job, especially what it means about my summer. I have a great opportunity to do something I’m really interested in -- Machine Learning -- and to apply it on a real-world project that will result in a usable and finished product. Plus, the work is really interests me and my colleagues are great. But sometimes I wonder: what’s all this for?

I’m making an algorithm to speed up data cleaning processes and to allow the bank to be more efficient at making revenue. But is that meaningful? Is that what I want to do for the rest of my life, help a big company make more money? I’m in an environment that is extremely focused on making money: why else would traders constantly invent new derived products? Every day, the goal is the same: to help the bank make more money.

Sure, the tools we employ to do that provide a valuable learning experience, and I’m getting a lot out of the internship in general. Yet there are times where I feel insignificant inside such a big corporation. I feel like I’m a small part of the huge financial system that works like a well oiled -- or, most of the time like a well oiled -- piece of machinery that has been around for decades and decades. It doesn’t feel like the work I’m doing actually matters. I just feel like an outer district, a disenfranchised citizen in the Hunger Games: I’m working for someone else’s goals, not for mine.

I know it’s easy for me to find negatives now that I have this internship, and that I shouldn’t complain because it will “look great on my resumé.” However, I feel so disconnected from the real world, and real world problems, that I can’t understand what the point of this system is. It just seems like the financial system is built out of thin air because all the money is fake and all the financial products people buy and sell are built upon themselves in layers so abstract that they don’t even mean anything in real life. Everyone makes the distinction between theory and applications, but right now it feels like the Math theory I learn in school is way more connected to the real world than all these imaginary products that are traded on the market.

I feel like we put ourselves in a bubble where all that matters is profit; all we care about are stock prices, interest rates, and currency indices. So I wonder why we are doing this, why we distance ourselves from tangible things. I wonder: to what end?