As my class (’09) crawls ever closer toward graduation, it seems to me that our nascent career goals have become more pragmatic. And by pragmatic, I mean that we care more about money. Sure, I know people who will spend their summer leading bike trips, or sequestered in writers’ colonies, or performing works of altruism in third-world countries. By and large we’re a socially aware campus - compared to most, at any rate.

But with crunchtime approaching, our priorities have begun to perceptibly shift. The summer before senior year is the time (or so says conventional wisdom) for securing an elite job/internship, the resume-builder that will elevate an applicant above armies of high-achieving clones from Brown and Dartmouth and Williams. The job hunt in earnest nears, and we’ve no choice but to realistically consider what prospective careers we should target in, like, the Real World. The answer, for a surprising plurality, lies in the financial sector: i-banking, consulting, and the suite of other jobs that involve zapping electronic money from Point A to Point B. And that, I think, is a shame. A damn shame, in fact.

Okay, I’m about to reveal my prejudice and ignorance. At the risk of sounding like the smelly old man who sits in front of your town’s VFW building, sipping from a hip flask and pestering passersby with ad hominem attacks against hip-hop and the internet, I’ll say this: I don’t really know how i-banking works, but I don’t like it. I can’t escape the sense that the point of the endeavor is, A) to help the rich get richer, and B) to get rich yourself.

And I feel like this latter lure is insidious, that it’s corrupting otherwise charitable and generous people. Look, I’m sure there are students at this school who love the financial world, who relish plopping down in front of a computer and doing money-related things, things which I understand so poorly that I can’t even begin to satirize them. But, come on, there can’t be too many kids like that; we’re a liberal arts college, and not, say, UPenn. It seems like a lot of students arrive at Amherst with diverse academic pursuits and a developing social conscience, but when push comes to shove and they have to make real decisions about their future, the desire for financial success trumps the desire to do interesting and meaningful things.

Look, I’m a sellout too. I don’t want to be poor. I consider myself an environmentalist, which means that if I practiced what I preached, I’d start a subsistence farm and live off the zucchinis I grew in my back yard. But I’m too complacent, I suppose, to live outside the system, which means that I’ll need money like all you saps. That said, I genuinely don’t want to be rich. I’m not revolted by wealth on principle, but its accumulation is very low on my list of priorities - say, 387th.  Compelling psychological studies (which I would cite if I had any journalistic integrity) indicate that money contributes nothing to happiness. (This is true, notably, for families above the poverty line; the dirt-poor are understandably miserable, though that’s a whole ‘nother issue.) Anyway, if you think that makes me sound holier-than-thou, well, I’ve been called worse.

Nonchalance towards wealth puts me in the minority, however, both among my financially-minded peers and in the US of A. I’m very, very skeptical that any i-banker derives emotional or spiritual sustenance from padding some cigar-chomping CEO’s bankroll with another million. I’m confident claiming that investment bankers enter their field only - or at least predominantly - to make money. (And also because a network of Amherst alumni crawl the guilded halls of Merrill Lynch.)

To my mind, the i-banking example represents one of America’s great unchallenged and destructive tenets: the disconnect between ‘work’ and ‘leisure.’ Americans in all sorts of careers loathe their jobs, yet they suffer through 9-to-5’s in order to accumulate wealth. And when they’ve accumulated enough, they get to… spend it! They can take vacations for ten whole days at a time, and eat sushi at Nobu, and buy sailboats! They can purchase modern art and go snowboarding! They can rent suites at the Marriott! The ethic goes like this: if you work diligently and without complaint, someday, someday, you can play.

So here’s my batshit insane idea: what if our work and our play were the same thing? What if we chose careers based solely on what we felt passionate about, what we most enjoyed? If work was a delight, would we need to escape to spas and ski slopes? Would we need to spend money on leisure as profligately, or even at all? Would anybody choose to be an i-banker?

But how feasible is such a dramatic realignment of priorities in this country? Maybe America didn’t invent the work/play dichotomy, but we’ve sure as hell perfected it. That’s because our leisure time has become inseparable from our unparalleled consumerism, from our use of fossil fuels and plastics and imported Brazilian ribeyes. We can’t relax without spending money, so, out of necessity, we work like dogs to earn more. Industries would collapse en masse if Americans stopped spending on pleasure. Legions of suddenly unemployed JetBlue pilots and golf instructors and Best Buy salesmen would revolt.

Yet I say that a paradigm reversal isn’t impossible. I’m not the world’s most experienced traveler, so I can’t speak specifically to the state of affairs in too many other countries. But after spending last semester in Australia and New Zealand, I can tell you that those cultures adhere to a different dynamic than Americans, and to a far preferable one. Everywhere I went, I met people who spend their lives pursuing work that’s low-paying, seasonal, travel-heavy, and flat-out fun. By and large, Kiwis and Aussies care much more about their emotional well-being than their paychecks. Their work doubles as vacation; thus they don’t have the same imperative to earn and spend. An example: at a hostel on the South Island, I bunked with a Kiwi who works half the year in NZ as a naturalist on a whale-watching boat, and the other half as a park ranger in Utah. Maybe JP Morgan executives can afford to wipe their ass with hundred-dollar bills, but I came away convinced that there’s nobody on the face of the fucking planet who loves life more than that dude.

Anyway, I’ll resist the urge to moralize more than I already have during this post. Look, if you really, truly, sincerely love investment banking or consulting or stock-broking or whatever, then more power to you. Go to it. And if you’re pursuing it solely because you want to line your pockets, well, that’s your perogative; I can’t stop you. But, again, wealth and happiness aren’t correlated. Earning and spending will not make you happy. Seriously. And at least in my limited experience, anecdotal evidence supports that claim.

Ultimately I think it’s a shame that our priorities are skewed, and that many of my bright and motivated colleagues are going to choose professions that they don’t love, embodied by the financial sector. And I hope - no, I believe - that the work/leisure dichotomy is reversible; and what’s more, should be reversed. Refute me.