Five Minutes on Mondays: Finding Unexpected Purpose, Peace, and Fulfillment at Work

Bad Banker: Living in Abundance

I love reading NewYorker cartoons. With one picture and a short caption, many of these cartoons lightly capture existential truths that would require entire books to unfold. Last week’s issue featured a cartoon that showed a depressed man lying on a psychiatrist’s sofa, staring aimlessly at the ceiling. The psychiatrist looks at him and says,

Just because you work at a bad bank doesn’t mean that you are a bad banker.

We are learning the hard way the devastating results of an unrestricted selfish focus on short-term monetary gain: of bad bankers doing bad things. And we are seeing the public’s anger at the people who pursued vast quantities of wealth, seemingly without concern for consequences to others. As ...