Reflection

Finance: The Golden Cage

Few cages are as comfortable, or as hard to leave, as a career in finance. From the outside it is the picture of success. From the inside, a great many of the people who built it describe something quieter and more troubling: a sense of being trapped by the very life they worked so hard to create.

The modern alchemist

Carl Jung spent the last decades of his life studying alchemy, and concluded that the alchemists were never really trying to turn lead into gold. They were projecting an inner search, a longing for transformation, onto the matter in front of them. The gold they sought was psychological: wholeness, meaning, a self made whole.

Finance has its own alchemists. The quant searching for the perfect model, the trader hunting the formula that consistently prints money, the banker who believes the next deal, the next bonus, the next structure will finally deliver the thing. It is the same ancient quest in modern dress: the search for the formula that turns effort into gold. And like the alchemists, many discover that the gold itself was never quite the point, even as they find they cannot stop pursuing it.

The alchemists have multiplied

For a long time this was a small profession. It is not any more.

The quant with his model now has a great deal of company: the retail trader with a system, the crypto holder waiting for the cycle, the person selling a course about how to sell courses, the influencer converting attention into income, the founder whose product is a method for making money. Different vocabularies, one structure. Each is looking for the formula that transmutes effort into gold, and each believes the formula exists and is findable.

That is the alchemical position exactly. Not greed, which is much simpler and much less interesting. A conviction that there is a secret, that other people have it, and that possessing it would change what one is.

The tell is what happens at both ends. When the formula fails, the search does not stop; it moves to the next formula, and the next, with the certainty intact and only the method replaced. And when it works, which for some it does, the gold arrives and does not deliver what it was sought for, so the search continues anyway, now with money.

There is a further turn in the modern version that the medieval alchemists never managed. A great many people have discovered it is more reliable to sell the stone than to find it: to make one’s living teaching the formula to others who are still looking. That is a real business and it works, and it also means a person can spend a decade selling a transformation they have not themselves undergone. It is difficult to think of a lonelier position, and it is one I see.

None of this is a comment on ambition, which is not a problem. It becomes one at the point where it stops being chosen, and I have written about that threshold in the addictive personality.

Abundance, manifestation, and where the projection lands

The most literal alchemists working today are not in finance at all. They are the people practising abundance and manifestation.

It deserves to be taken seriously rather than mocked, and Jung is the reason why. His whole point about the alchemists was that they were not deluded fools: they were engaged in a genuine psychological process, a real transformation, which they mistakenly believed was happening in the retort in front of them. The transmutation was occurring. They had simply located it in the wrong place.

Manifestation makes precisely the same move, with unusual purity. It correctly intuits that inner state matters, that attention shapes a life, that what a person believes about themselves has consequences. All of that is defensible. Then it takes that inner process and demands a material output from it, on a timescale, denominated in money. The gold has to appear in the account or the work is judged to have failed.

That is the original error, repeated exactly. Not the belief in transformation, which is sound, but the insistence that transformation prove itself by producing gold.

There is a clinical reason to care rather than simply to disagree. The doctrine contains a closed loop: if the abundance does not arrive, the explanation offered is that you did not believe correctly, that some residue of scarcity in you repelled it. The failure is always the practitioner’s inner state, never the method. That structure cannot be disproved, and it reliably produces shame in people who are already struggling.

It is the same structure as telling someone with an addiction that they need more willpower. Both locate the fault in the sufferer, both are unfalsifiable, and both leave the person more ashamed and no further forward.

None of which means a positive outlook counts for nothing. It plainly does. Expectation shapes what a person notices, what they attempt, how they recover from a setback, and whether they walk into a room believing they might belong in it. Anyone who has done clinical work has watched that change outcomes.

But it changes them through what the person then does. The only people who come to your door uninvited are bailiffs and salesmen. An employer has never knocked on anyone’s door. The interview happens because a letter was sent. The client arrives because something was built and someone was told about it. The inner shift is real and it is not sufficient, because it works by making the action possible, not by replacing it.

That is also, incidentally, what Jung meant. Individuation is not a visualisation practice. It is a long, effortful, largely unglamorous engagement with an actual life, including the parts of it a person would rather not look at. Nobody in his account of it gets transformed by sitting still and expecting.

The most accurate version of the whole argument I have heard put simply: hard work brings you to a place where luck can find you. Luck is real, and almost every substantial career contains a piece of it that the person did not arrange. But it arrives at an address, and the work is what puts you at that address.

When your mood is your P&L

In few other professions is a person’s emotional state so directly fused to a number. On a trading floor, money behaves like energy. When the P&L is green there is an almost chemical lift, an inflation of the self, quickly shadowed by the fear that it will not hold. When it is red, the deflation is just as physical: flat, diminished, as though one’s own worth had been marked down along with the position. To live this way is to be revalued, every single day, by a figure that does not care about you. It is exhilarating, and it is exhausting, and over years it quietly fuses your sense of who you are to a number on a screen.

The inflation and the dread

Jung had a word for the state of someone who identifies with something larger than themselves: inflation. The good year, the standout bonus, can inflate the self, and the higher the inflation the greater the fear of the fall. Beneath the confidence there is often a persistent dread that it cannot continue, that the run will end, that one will be found out, that the formula will stop working. Success bought at this price does not feel like safety. It feels like a height from which one might drop.

The golden cage

So a great many people in finance arrive at a strange impasse. They no longer find much meaning in the work. If asked honestly, they would like to do something else. But they cannot, because an entire life has been built on a level of income that only finance pays. The house, the schools, the lifestyle, the obligations: all of it rests on a wage that can be earned almost nowhere else. The success has become a set of handcuffs, beautifully made, in gold. The cage is real, it is comfortable, and it is still a cage.

Money anxiety that money does not answer

Something worth naming, because it surprises people who assume the opposite.

Anxiety about money does not track how much money someone has. I have sat with people worth a very great deal who carry a level of financial dread that would be more understandable in someone with nothing, and it does not lift when the position improves. The bonus lands, the relief lasts a fortnight, and the anxiety returns at exactly its former volume attached to a larger number.

That is the clinically useful observation. A realistic financial worry responds to facts: the balance rises and the worry falls. Money anxiety does not, and its failure to respond is the evidence that it was never really about the money. It is attached to something else that money has been asked to carry.

Which is why the target keeps moving. There is always a figure that would finally settle it, and it is always somewhat more than the current one, and it is never reached, because arriving at it does not do what it was supposed to do.

Where financial trauma usually starts

Ask where it began and, with striking regularity, the answer is childhood.

A family that lost everything. A father’s business collapsing, and the atmosphere in the house afterwards. A parent who used money to control, or withheld it as punishment, so that asking for anything became dangerous. Or, most commonly and least dramatically, simply not having enough at an age when a child can do nothing about it and understands only that the adults are frightened.

What forms then is not a belief about money. It is a bodily conviction about safety. The child concludes that money is what stands between the family and catastrophe, and that conviction does not update itself later just because the bank statement changes. It goes on operating, at full strength, in a forty-eight-year-old with a portfolio.

That is financial trauma, and it produces two apparently opposite patterns that are the same wound. Compulsive accumulation, where no sum is ever enough to constitute safety. And an inability to keep money, where it is spent or lost almost as fast as it arrives, because holding it produces an anxiety that spending relieves.

The two halves of the same person

There is a connection here worth making explicit, because the same man often has both.

The capacity that built the wealth, the obsession and the compulsion that let him outwork everyone around him, is the subject of a separate piece on the addictive personality. What that piece does not address is what happens when it succeeds.

The money arrives. The thing it was supposed to fix is not fixed. And the only tool he has ever had for an unsolved problem is to apply more of the capacity that got him here, which means more work, more accumulation, and a larger version of the same emptiness. The success is not the cure for the drivenness. It is the drivenness, rewarded, and therefore harder to question.

This is also why the drinking, the training or the counting so often appear at exactly the point where a career becomes secure. Not despite the achievement. Because of what the achievement failed to deliver.

When it is worth taking seriously

Not every worry about money is a psychological matter, and it is worth being honest about that. Where the difficulty is genuinely practical, the right help is financial rather than therapeutic.

It is worth attention when the distress is disproportionate to the actual position. When it does not respond to improvement. When you are unable to spend on anything that would give you pleasure despite being demonstrably able to afford it. When you cannot look at the accounts, or cannot stop looking at them. When the family has learned not to raise the subject. When the decision to stay in a job you no longer believe in has been made silently, every year, for a decade.

And particularly when you have realised that the number that was going to settle everything came and went, and settled nothing.

What wealth is often standing in for

Here is the version of this that I hear most often, and it is rarely said directly.

For almost all of human history, security did not mean an account balance. It meant people. A family, a village, a trade, a group who would notice if you did not appear and would arrive if something went wrong. That was the only insurance there was, and it worked, and it required you to be known.

Money offers the same promise with the vulnerability removed. Enough of it and you need not depend on anyone, need not ask, need not risk being turned down, need not be known well enough by anybody to be genuinely disappointed by them. That is precisely its appeal, and precisely why it does not work. The thing being avoided, being dependent on people, is the thing that would have provided the security in the first place.

So the accumulation continues, because it is trying to reach by one route a destination that can only be reached by another. No sum produces the feeling of being held, because being held is not a sum.

The test I find most useful is not net worth. It is this: if something went badly wrong tonight, who would you call, and would they come? Not who would take a professional interest. Who would arrive. A significant number of very wealthy people cannot answer that question, and the ones who can are usually the ones for whom the money genuinely did settle into being just money.

And there is a reason so few people can answer it, which has nothing to do with wealth.

We live in a culture where a person can describe their sex life over dinner without embarrassment, in detail, to people they barely know. The same person cannot say you matter to me, or I would be lost without you, to someone they have known for thirty years. We have made the physical sayable and left the emotional unsayable, and it is worth noticing how strange that is.

The reason is not squeamishness. It is exposure. Sexual candour costs almost nothing now, because it commits you to nobody. Telling someone they are important to you is a declaration that can be received badly, or not returned, and it hands them something they could later use. It requires you to need them, out loud.

So it goes unsaid. Which means the people who would in fact come, at three in the morning, have never been told they are on that list, and you have never been told whether you are on theirs. The network that constitutes actual security exists, sometimes, but it has never been made explicit, so nobody can rely on it. And an unrelied-upon safety net produces exactly the free-floating insecurity that money then gets asked to solve.

This is the same structure I see in eating disorders, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. There, the deprivation of closeness is unbearable and unnameable, so the psyche translates it into something concrete with a solution: hunger. Food is available, requires nobody’s permission, and cannot refuse you. Money does the identical job in a different currency. It is available, requires nobody’s permission, and cannot turn you down. Both are substitutes for being wanted, and both fail for the same reason. The full account of that mechanism is in The Jail of Discipline and Food Noise.

What the gold was standing in for

The way through is rarely as simple as leaving, and leaving is rarely the real point. The deeper question is the one the alchemists eventually had to face: what was the gold standing in for? When meaning has drained out of the work and a person’s entire sense of value is denominated in P&L, the task is to recover a self that the market does not price. That does not necessarily mean walking away from finance. It means finding what the money was always meant to deliver and never could, and rebuilding a life that does not depend, emotionally, on the next number.

This is depth work, and it is best done confidentially, with someone who understands both the world you operate in and the psychology beneath it. The real gold the alchemists sought was never in the crucible. It was in themselves.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

If any of this is familiar and you would like to discuss it, you can get in touch here.

For senior professionals, this work is done discreetly and around a demanding diary: executive coaching, and where a dependence has formed, confidential addiction treatment.

On what the golden cage does to someone who is exhausted inside it, and how to tell burnout from depression, see burnout or depression in the expatriate executive.