At one level an investment banking career isn’t an obvious one for generating grievances. The job comes with high pay and prestige, conferring real influence over companies and markets. From the outside, finance appears to offer an unusually compelling bundle of money, status, and impact.
Yet inside, dissatisfaction is common. Many high-performing finance professionals carry a persistent sense that something important is happening somewhere else. Why?
My hunch is that investment bankers belong to a particular species which I call Fomo sapiens. What’s sad, and arguably tragic, is that people who seem to have it all often experience success primarily as a catalogue of missed opportunities.
FOMO, or fear of missing out, in finance is not quite synonymous with envy. It lies at a deeper psychological level, and it’s continually structured and reinforced by daily exposure to information, competition, and comparison. It operates most powerfully across three dimensions: deals, compensation, and the belief in a better gig.
Deal FOMO comes first. Finance is obsessed with visibility. This is especially (but not uniquely) true of capital markets desks. League tables and press releases function as public scorecards of a bank’s relevance. The market may produce hundreds of solid transactions each year, but attention concentrates on a handful of headline deals. These few become symbolic. They set the narrative.
The Fomo sapiens does not treat a deal done away as a statistical inevitability. They experience each as a personal slight and a wounding rejection. A rival firm’s logo on a press release feels accusatory. Why them? Why not us/me?
This mindset turns a complex mix of client relationships, balance sheet outlay, sector dynamics, and luck into a story of individual and institutional failure.
One of my biggest career regrets is that the wins seemed to be absorbed quickly and forgotten, while the losses lingered — I remember the Ls more than the Ws. In fact, even objectively strong years sometimes felt incomplete if the defining transaction happened via other banks. One of the reasons I started writing these columns is that my memory had become distorted, full of woulda-shoulda-coulda but overlooking the achievements.
There are other flavours of FOMO. Comp FOMO is even more corrosive. Compensation season should be a moment of celebration or at least relief. Instead, it becomes an exercise in imagined rankings. The absolute number matters but only up to a point. What really matters is where it sits in a leaderboard no one except the group heads has seen but everyone believes they know anyway.
A payout that would astonish almost anyone outside finance can feel disappointing if rumours suggest someone else in a comparable position did slightly better. At this point, money stops functioning as security or freedom and becomes a proxy for status. The Fomo sapiens is not asking if they are paid well, but rather whether they are paid better than their peers and moreover, how much someone else in the tribe got paid. This is how people end up earning life-changing sums while feeling both unappreciated and unappreciative.
Gig FOMO is the most existential of the three. It is the belief that a real career — the one that would finally feel coherent and rewarding — exists just beyond one’s current role. It might be a hedge fund where merit is supposedly cleaner. It might be a private equity or private credit job where you are directing capital and raking in life-changing carry. Or maybe a boutique with less politics, or perhaps a technology company offering purpose and uncapped upside.
Recruiters, social media, office chat and the media all sustain this illusion. Former colleagues appear to be prospering in roles that look both more interesting and more authentic. The Fomo sapiens rarely examines the full reality of these moves.
Most jobs look cleaner from a distance. Up close, they contain the same trade-offs, just rearranged. Long hours, different pressures, bigger risks, and new compromises are overlooked. The fantasy role is usually the current job with the tedious parts removed and the risks understated.
Relative metrics must be supplemented — if not replaced — by personal ones
The irony is that this mindset generates unhappiness in people who are, by any reasonable standard, extremely fortunate. It explains why burnout is common even in teams that are doing well. It explains brittle relationships with colleagues and the inability to disengage. If the best deal, the biggest bonus, or the ideal role might be happening elsewhere, then you can’t unplug easily. Restlessness is the default setting.
The solution is not to abandon finance or ambition. It is to rethink and reimagine how one measures success. Relative metrics must be supplemented — if not replaced — by personal ones. What skills did you build this year? Which clients trust you more than before? Which transactions did you execute well, regardless of whether they made headlines?
The bankers who remain both effective and sane learn to quarantine their FOMO. They stay competitive, but their competition is contained and constrained. They focus on their own jobs and on maximising their impact and contribution.
Without this adjustment, the Fomo sapiens experiences perpetual grievance: a career that looks from the outside like a triumph of prestige and financial reward; but feels from the inside like exclusion and subordination.
To spend a working life convinced that the good stuff is always happening elsewhere is a peculiar form of poverty and, in my view, an avoidable one. Sometimes you have to rethink what, exactly, you think you’re chasing.