Out on the Street

The Feb. 7 story, “Wall Street Jobs Crashed With Market,” was a timely, updated version of the Great American Tragedy--the horror of being unemployed.

Perhaps the real tragedy is that so many people still insist on identifying themselves only by what they do for a living and how much money they are making. Jasper Connolly, the unemployed Wall Streeter still reeling from Black Monday, called himself and his counterparts “very intelligent and very highly skilled.” But apparently he wasn’t insightful enough to remember that business goes in cycles of depression and boom times (I assume he had Economics I in college) and that being a businessman himself, he’d be a part of it.

Not having a job that pays $75,000 a year must, admittedly, be a horrible financial ordeal for Connolly and his suddenly unemployed Wall Street colleagues. But I find it unbelievable that not having a salary that big also causes him to have all kinds of spiritual self-doubts and wonder what his purpose is in life. A hundred years from now, nobody will care how much money he made, how big a house he lived in, what kind of car he drove, how much he paid for his clothes and his furniture, what his girlfriend looked like or what he did with his MBA degree.

MATTHEW OKADA

Pasadena