The art of the goodbye message

The writer is a former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America

A senior investment banker I know recently announced his retirement on LinkedIn. He wrote a thoughtful, graceful post, thanking clients, colleagues and family. He said he had great memories, no regrets and an enduring feeling of purpose and impact from his three decades in the job.

The post didn’t stop there. He went on to list everything he was looking forward to pursuing: private investments, non-executive directorships, charitable endeavours, film projects, wine projects and collaborations in the sectors he was interested in. He promised further updates after the summer. Retirement, it seemed, was going to be pretty hectic.

In some ways his message reminded me of one of the most controversial genres of modern discourse: the family Christmas letter. Every year around Yuletide we receive — mostly, but not exclusively, from American friends — a typed missive cataloguing 12 months of uninterrupted accomplishment (“Ben was admitted to Columbia, Jessica set a personal best in the half-marathon, we saw polar bears on our Svalbard expedition” etc). It concludes with exciting plans and great expectations for next year. Each individual sentence is unobjectionable, even interesting, but taken as a whole, the message turns autobiography into self-hagiography.

Retirement posts follow a similar formula. They first express gratitude, then enumerate various career achievements (usually leavened with a touch of self-deprecating irony), talk up new opportunities and invite everyone to watch this space for further details.

Nowadays retirement seems to come with a legal disclaimer: “I may be leaving the job but I’m still relevant. Really!” You have to justify retirement; it can’t just happen. There has to be a strategy, a plan.

Perhaps that is because elite professions have a fraught relationship with the idea of “enough”. They are built around relentless progression and momentum. You win a deal and there’s another to chase. You make managing director, and there’s a group head role to pursue. You receive a good bonus, and it’s imperative you produce more to get paid more next year.

Like other high-end professions, investment banking has a habit of turning what you do into who you are. It becomes a big part of your identity and you develop an ingrained sense of your own indispensability. Things just wouldn’t get done if you weren’t there to push.

And when your departure is announced, it is an intoxicatingly heady feeling. A firm-wide memo is sent. The news wires and trade magazines pick up the news. Messages from well-wishers pour in. For a brief afternoon, you enjoy that pre-Copernican illusion of being at the centre of attention. Everyone is talking about you, praising you, promising to stay in touch.

Then you walk through the turnstiles for the final time. It doesn’t take long to realise that no matter what you accomplished, the firm carries on without you. Someone else is taking your office. Management is reassigning your clients. The institution forgets you remarkably quickly. Like Gilgamesh, you discover there is no immortality after all.

That’s why so few of these retirement announcements say simply: “Thanks for the memories, I’ve had a good enough run, hasta la vista, Baby.” Instead, they resemble Academy Award acceptance speeches, complete with the obligatory roll call of clients, colleagues and family and an understandable whiff of self-congratulation. But while the orchestra plays music to force prolix Oscar winners off the stage, there is no equivalent on LinkedIn.

So every end becomes a new beginning. There’s talk of new ventures, new roles, new milestones. The retirement post turns out to be the trailer to the sequel we may not have asked for.

Of course some people manage to break away cleanly. They leave, and you never hear from them again. Finance was just something they did for many years, and now they’ve moved on. But they are the minority.

When I left banking four years ago, virtually everyone asked me what I was going to do next. It was the first question. Rarely did anyone ask whether I was happy to be out of the business. Even now, people ask me whether I still miss the “game” and am looking to go back. Few seem comfortable with the idea that someone might simply decide that one career is enough.

Hence these retirement announcements always promise another act. Not because the people writing them are vainglorious, but because they’ve spent 30 years in a profession that never really teaches you how to stop.