What Is This All For
Introduction
There is a certain type of discomfort that accumulates slowly in professional life. It can show up in small moments: an oddly heavy Sunday evening, a performance review that leaves you empty despite it going well, or a conversation about work aspirations that is far less exciting to think about in retrospect. I initially noticed this discomfort not in myself but in the people a few years ahead of me. Working my first corporate job over the summer, I spent a lot of time having coffee chats with my associates, partners, etc., trying to understand what drew them to their work. While most did not seem unhappy, I struggled to ascertain a sense of clarity from anyone. There were surely elements of competence and momentum but not meaning and a sort of higher purpose that you can attribute to your typical MD resident.
I do not think this is a problem specific to finance, but finance makes it visible. In this industry, you can’t say “this work feels useless” when there is intellectual intensity, high stakes, and complexity. It becomes easier to conflate the difficulty, lucrativeness, and novelty of the job with purpose. A question I have growingly thought about is what is this actually for? This paper will turn to the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist thought because I have found myself automatically synthesizing lessons from them as I have contemplated more on the meaning of a career. I have done so because, in general, I believe humans have always lived within systems that work against their own clarity.
What Finance Asks of You
Finance asks you to passionately care about outcomes that are hard to control – whether you are advising on a deal, managing a portfolio, or building a model that will inform another person’s decision. Work is consequential, feedback is swift, and metrics tend to be objective, which leads to exhaustion. Over time, people may fall prey to organizing around these metrics. You can’t blame them, though – it’s a natural response to an environment where performance is a very legible indicator of value. There is also the issue of confidence. Finance certainly rewards people who are confident and right, but I imagine it can be hard to distinguish between veritable conviction and the performance of it. As an example, I spoke with a first year analyst at an investment bank while writing this. When I asked what drew him to the work, his answer seemed instinctual and rehearsed. However, when I asked what he found meaningful about it, there was a much longer pause.
It’s also worth noting that this dynamic begins before the job itself. Getting into finance (recruiting, networking, prestige signaling, etc.) demands what you can consider a type of identity investment before you have even done any real work. You have to want it visibly and convincingly, which means you have to almost construct a self around wanting it. Once you arrive at the job, you have built an outcome-dependence organized around the thing that finance rewards.
While talking to the mentioned two professionals in the field, I found out that keeping a level of discipline in this profession can involve intentional actions away from the office. While none of them would explicitly call their methods philosophical, they both referred to the simple actions that allowed them to remain stable. The first one talked about the need for them to step back at certain points in the day and think through their decisions and the market situations, especially when things started getting complicated. The second talked about his actions outside the work space such as doing exercises and sometimes mindfulness as a way to separate himself from his performance at work. None of them presented these methods as solutions to the challenges involved in the job but rather as tools to manage them.
An examination into human motivation literature provides yet another perspective for explaining why this setting might appear to be somewhat skewed. According to Self-Determination Theory, formulated by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, a healthy state relies on three key factors: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. It is clear that finance satisfies the need for competence. Achievement is transparent, there is instant feedback, and advancement is structured. At an advanced level, it can even offer a measure of autonomy. However, it appears to be lacking in relatedness – both in the social and more intrinsic sense, where one feels connected to something larger than oneself through one’s endeavors. If competence develops to such a degree as to be disproportionate to the others, it produces a sort of imbalance, where one can improve his/her skills without knowing the purpose. This could account for the vagueness I noticed in discussions with those who performed well but were unable to express a greater significance of their work.
This overall environment makes a job in finance really hard. You have to care to do the work well. The question these texts (The Bhagavad Gita and Expectations Investing) will press on relates exactly to (i) what you are caring about, and (ii) what that caring costs.
The Gita’s Diagnosis
To approach the question of what we are caring about and what that caring costs, let’s step out of the modern professional context. The Bhagavad Gita begins with a crisis of action. Arjuna, a warrior prepared for battle, is unable to act. He is overwhelmed by the weight of what action can lead to – death, loss, and consequences that he cannot fully control. Arjuna’s hesitation doesn’t come from uncertainty regarding how to act but rather whether acting is justified given the outcomes. In this vein, Arjuna’s paralysis is structured around the same issue that undergirds much of modern professional life. That is, the entanglement of action with its results. The recruit who builds an identity around getting the job, and the warrior who cannot act without owning the outcome are caught in the same trap.
In Krishna’s response to Arjuna, he says, “You have a right to action, but not to the fruits of action." At first, I assumed this meant something along the lines of not worrying outcomes. What I realized in class this more aptly means, though, is that outcomes do not belong to you in the way actions do. Outcomes are shaped by forces beyond our control, so they cannot reasonably serve as a basis for identity, meaning, or the likes. If outcomes are not ours, then we shouldn’t organize our sense of self around them. Success, failure, validation, worth, etc. become inherently unstable.
The Gita brings up the concept of nishkama karma – action without the attachment to the fruits of action. This isn’t indifference or disengagement. Krishna didn’t advise Arjuna to drop the battle entirely; instead, Krishna told him to act fully. This means committing to the action but relinquishing the psychological dependence on the outcome. Interestingly enough, this shifts the object concern from results to the quality of the action (the discipline, attention, and clarity). This is reinforced by the Gita’s attribution of yoga as a kind of equanimity. Success and failure ideally lose their authority over one’s inner state. They don’t relate to the meaningfulness of an action.
I wonder about finance as a question of true calling or not (or, for that matter, any profession). Svadharma is the idea that duty isn’t generic but specific to who you are, your nature, your position, and your moment. In the Gita, Krishna doesn’t just tell Arjuna to act without attachment – he tells him to act in accordance with his own dharma as a warrior. He notes that it’s better to perform your own dharma imperfectly than another’s dharma perfectly. How do you determine if a job is really your own calling? I understand that this bridges into a completely different conversation, but I believe this question to be a necessary step for further exploration. This question is beyond the scope of this paper, but I think it will be important to press towards answering this.
Applied to finance, I believe that the aforementioned identity investment and outcome-dependence are not incidental features but, on the account of the Gita, the very source of the problem.
Buddhist Thought and Distortion
Where the Gita diagnoses a problem in how we tie outcomes to actions, Buddhist thought approaches a similar issue from a different vantage: how the mind comes to see things incorrectly in the first place. It’s not just that we become attached to outcomes. It’s also that this attachment influences our perception before a decision is made. I wanted to bring forward the Buddhist idea of the five hindrances here. These five – sensual desire, ill will, sloth, restlessness, and doubt – are mental states that obstruct clarity. Buddhism presents these as tendencies that condition how we process through the world. I feel two of these – alongside one of the conventional three poisons (attachment, aversion, and ignorance) – are particularly relevant in a context like finance. These are desire, aversion, and restlessness.
Desire is not just craving things. It is how craving organizes attention around what feels rewarding. In finance, this could be something like overweighting upside, getting attracted to narratives that confirm a thesis you are already excited about, or holding a position longer than the evidence warrants because you have embedded the potential gain with the opportunity at large. Though all the information is present, the issue lies in what you likely unconsciously choose to focus on.
Aversion is the inclination to avoid, discount, or reposition information that is unwelcome. This may be why it is so hard to exit a losing position or update a thesis when you discover contradictory information. I know that in behavioral finance this refers to loss aversion. Buddhism goes a step further: aversion is not just how you bias the weight assigned to information but also the ability to completely ignore information. The mind develops other interpretations because aversion has shaped what feels possible (this is not necessarily dishonest).
Restlessness is the inability to tolerate uncertainty or stillness. It manifests as the compulsion to act, adjust, and respond even if inaction is more apt. What I believe is the most representative application of this in finance is the reflexive need to always have a view on something. Sometimes, less truly is more. I spoke with a friend who is a second year analyst at a hedge fund about this. He made a point I hadn't considered. Unlike banking, you can always just not invest. There is no deal that needs to close, no client expecting a recommendation. Doing nothing is a real option. But even with that freedom, he said the pressure to have a view and act on it never really goes away. The culture rewards conviction and activity even when the honest answer is that you are not sure. To me, this is restlessness in exactly the sense Buddhism describes…not a personal failing but something the environment builds in
Together, these hindrances are not biases that distort an otherwise accurate perception. They operate sequentially: conditioning what information you seek out, what you tend to remember, and what you dismiss. I’m not arguing that finance professionals make overwhelmingly emotional decisions. The crux is that by the time a decision is made, the reality forming it is inauthentic.
I view this as particularly relevant in investing, where decisions are not made based on objective outcomes but expectations regarding the future. In Expectations Investing, Michael Maouboussin (financial expert) explains that stock prices reflect the market’s expectations of future performance, not the performance itself. This suggests that investors are not simply reacting to reality but to interpretations of what others believe will happen. Now, if those interpretations are already shaped by desire, aversion, etc. then the object of decision-making itself seems unstable.
Bringing the Two Together
The Gita and Buddhist thought seem to diagnose the same underlying problem. The Gita centers on action and our attachment to its results, whereas Buddhist thought centers on perception and the ways that craving and aversion may shape what we see before we act. Both converge on the idea of instability in organizing one’s life around things that are not fully within one’s control.
In the Gita, instability reveals itself as the mentioned outcome-dependence. When we tie identity to success, failure, or validation, our action is burdened by forces that extend far past it. In Buddhist thought, the instability emerges earlier. We don’t just become attached to outcomes; this attachment reshapes our perception. Desire and the other hindrances determine what stands out to us, what we are compelled by, and what we ignore.
This creates a feedback loop. Outcomes matter, so they become objects of attachment. That attachment shapes what opportunities seem compelling, what risks feel tolerable, what narratives are persuasive. Then, those perceptions inform action, which circles back to outcomes. This is a vicious cycle.
In finance, performance is measured, compared, and rewarded in very visible ways. Gradually, it makes sense that we treat these metrics as indicators of value rather than just feedback. Simultaneously, the conditions of the work – uncertainty, time pressure, and constant information – make it notably hard to maintain clarity at the level of perception. These forces that Buddhism identifies as distortive are persistently activated. This is what makes the combined diagnosis of these two traditions more unsettling than either offers alone. The Gita tells you that outcome-attachment destabilizes identity. Buddhism tells you that this attachment was already shaping what you saw before you made any decision at all. Together, they describe not a problem of occasional emotional interference but something more total: a system where the conditions for clear action are inherently undermined. Some may feel we can solve this with better emotional regulation, stricter process, or bias awareness, but that assumes the problem is individual. These traditions suggest it may be environmental.
The volatility of such decisions is even further magnified by considering the implications for expectations-driven investments. As noted by Mauboussin, prices are not determined by the value of an investment itself but by market expectations of its future performance. Investing thus becomes less a matter of establishing facts but rather predicting how people will perceive and act based on their interpretations of facts. The decision is no longer made with regard to reality; it involves an additional layer of perceptions – expectations about other people’s perceptions.
With the distortions identified within the Buddhist tradition, this forms a rather precarious epistemic setting. When desire, aversion, and restlessness can influence the salience of information available to the individual, then expectations cannot be made against a clean slate. Instead, expectations will be based on a selective perception of reality, one which has already been influenced psychologically. This means that financial decision-making may not simply entail uncertainty in the future, but also the uncertainty surrounding the validity of the information being used to make such decisions. The warning from the Gita regarding attachment to consequences thus becomes far more serious in this regard. Not only are there no guarantees for the consequence itself, but its perception is also unreliable.
This brings about a new dimension to the earlier inquiry regarding the nature of what one’s attachment is really to. As far as action occurs according to expectations and expectations according to conditioned perceptions, attachment does not focus upon anything real but rather upon something which is continually being constructed through this process. The cycle discussed earlier (attachment influences perception, perception affects action, and action in turn produces results) occurs even more abstractly than before. It therefore becomes increasingly difficult to act in accordance with Gita’s call for detachment from results, for it seems to be a matter of being attached to constructs that were already abstract enough to begin with.
It’s possible to imagine ways of engaging with finance that incorporate a subset of these insights – placing greater emphasis on process, cultivating awareness of your own biases, or attempting to remain less reactive. At the same time, the premise of these adjustments is that we stay in an environment with the outcome pointed as central. How do you even act clearly within a system that has some form of outcome as a necessary result?
Conclusion
There is a difference between discomfort that is vague and discomfort that can be identified precisely. The former is easy to rationalize, while the latter is harder to dismiss. The conversations I had over the summer felt like the first kind. People were competent, very successful, but unclear in a way that I still don’t think I can articulate very well. In synthesizing thoughts on these traditions, I have at least come across reasons that underlie this discomfort: a misalignment between how we are asked to act, how we come to see, and what we structure our sense of value around.
I still haven’t ruled out the field of finance for myself. Actually, it’s quite probable that I will end up working in this realm. Discussing these notions and examining the demands the Gita places on actions have done more to refine my indecisiveness than to dispel it. The initial sense of confusion and dissatisfaction seems to have transformed into something else – namely, a conflict between two modes of behavior: detachment and attachment. It poses a larger question that goes beyond the realm of finance alone. It is by no means clear if there is any occupation in our age that can somehow escape this dichotomy. In most cases, one’s career path entails certain outcome-orientedness, dependence on external approval, and the definition of one’s own identity through performance. In this regard, the problem is not just about selecting the right profession but determining how one can act consciously in such systems.
The frameworks, at the very minimum, reconfigure the meaning of having a thoughtful approach toward one’s career aspirations. Instead of merely asking myself about my aspirations, I would have to question my attachments and how they influence my perceptions and at what cost I am structuring my values upon those attachments. Neither of the two finance professionals that I interviewed used such language to discuss their experiences, making it unclear if the conflict is something that is resolved eventually or if it just becomes part of the everyday experience of work [and fades into the background of things].
Regardless of whether a resolution is possible, it seems that an important step is having an understanding of the problem itself. If both the Gita and Buddhism teach that we are not owners of the effects of our actions, and that the very understanding we have of these effects is also influenced, then it is not enough simply to make an action but rather think about what acting at all means.