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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America and is now a managing director at Seda Experts
A competitor I knew used to pride himself on replying to any message within minutes, day or night. The fast turnaround impressed clients. I suspected the answers came quickly not because they were deeply considered, but because they were just plausible enough to satisfy the moment. Years before the technology existed, he had turned himself into a kind of bespoke ChatGPT: always on, glibly credible, and reliably reassuring.
This is not a criticism. I spent the better part of two decades doing much the same, though with less success. So did most of my peers. Only after leaving the industry have many of us begun to see the cost of that conditioning.
In investment banking and other high-end professional services, hyper-responsiveness is often regarded as a moral virtue. Clients expect it, and management rewards it. In a business where you’re constantly competing against both rival firms and your own colleagues, the first mover (or first reactor) advantage counts. If you’re not on top of your coverage, eight other banks are calling on your client, and one of your own teammates might step in.
I got my first BlackBerry in the early 2000s. By the time I left banking, the reflex of checking it had become second nature. We used to joke about the “CrackBerry”, but the moniker contained more truth than we cared to admit. Habits can be broken more easily than addictions can be kicked.
What has surprised many of us in retirement is how little the mindset changes once you walk out the door. You lose the devices and Bloomberg terminal. Deal flow dries up and the morning calls stop. Your inbox falls into a sepulchral silence. Yet the impulse to react immediately remains, as if responsiveness, rather than judgment, had been the point all along.
Indeed, the tendency becomes more pronounced. When you were working, time was scarce and scheduled; you checked your screen in the gaps between meetings and deadlines. Without that structure, the reflex stands exposed for what it is. I noticed it soon after I retired: a trivial email would arrive and I would reply within seconds, even though there was no reason to do so and no consequence if I did not.
It’s deeply ironic that in retirement, we often engage most when it matters least. We open messages faster when they’re inconsequential. We track market moves more closely even when they have little bearing on our lives. The reflex persists, even though the purpose has fallen away.
The fixation with news and current events reveals this most clearly. While working, there was a professional rationale for following every central bank statement, deal rumour and political utterance. Once you stop working, the behaviour should, in theory, disappear.
In practice, however, following the 24-hour cycle becomes the default mode: refresh, read, rinse and repeat — a kind of Groundhog Day for the erstwhile finance professional, minus the self-redemption arc. You click through a deal announcement even though no client is waiting for your take. Information piles up without ever being used. Without the old professional filters, everything feels equally current, and almost nothing feels necessary. The result is a low-grade mental clutter with none of the former pay-off.
We may not like the comparison to teenagers glued to their phones and tablets, but the phenomenon is similar. From the outside, it looks like compulsive scrolling; to us, it still passes as diligence — or at least staying “well-informed”. By contrast, idleness feels vaguely irresponsible.
The financial sector trains you to treat availability as your primary value. In a client service business, that makes sense: your expertise forms part of the product, and the product has to be accessible. The problem comes later. Outside that world, being “available” is rarely the most valuable thing you can offer. In financial services you are in effect selling your time; in retirement, it’s one asset you cannot buy back.
Diagnosing this malaise is easier than remedying it. Most of us who have left the industry are still figuring it out. The case for partially disengaging — for sitting with a question before replying, or allowing the breaking news to pass without immediate reaction — is incontestable. The difficulty lies elsewhere. It takes less effort to refresh a feed than to let an afternoon pass without perpetual updates.
The real transition to post-work life doesn’t happen when you sign the leaving papers, but at the moment you let a notification go unanswered and realise, for the first time in decades, that the world has not stopped turning.
