You said: "You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream."
Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up.
For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
The problem is that you typically build your habits in your first few years in your 20s. Many (not all) investment bankers build the habit of being consumed by work, neglecting exercise, eating unhealthily, and substituting money for happiness.
I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again."
My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)
"Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. "
That's an incredibly broad statement to make for the whole population. Everyone is different and have different tolerances.
I would agree with you to the extent that people are able to know their tolerances and stop, but that doesn't seem to be the case for banking.
I always say, Money (and hence career) is a solvable problem. Health less likely. You can't always solve away your chronic health issues by working harder, spending more money on it, etc.
It would be nice to ask all those people with chronic back pain, chronic insomnia, etc. that isn't easily fixable if the "opportunity" was worth it.
Before saying that your health is unlikely to suffer from a few years of banking hours, look at the sidebar in this exact article. It notes that four years of banking tends to produce chronic pain, auto-immune disease, and depression among other disorders.
It's not missing fingers and hands like you might have encountered in an early 20th century factory, but that absolutely sounds like long term health problems from a few years of banking work to me.
If you believe in the liberty of people to live life as they choose, it makes it a ton less wrong. They are living life with goals in mind. Some of these goals might even be, dare I say, valid.
If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.
This is an important point, and I think most people in IB would agree. However, some of that agreement would stem from déformation professionnelle. If those people had some way of stepping outside their current situation and evaluating the overall course of their employment, they might well choose differently. Of course, only old folks are really capable of that, and at that point they can't do much to fix it, so it's not as if the bankers have it worse than the rest of us.
