It’s 8:15 PM on a Tuesday in January 2026. Most of New York is settling in for dinner, but on my floor at a bulge-bracket firm in Midtown, the day is just hitting its second wind. I’ve just finished a “working dinner”—a lukewarm Sweetgreen bowl at my desk—while staring at a Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model that won’t behave. The deal? A cross-border acquisition in the AI-driven logistics space. In 2026, every deal is an AI deal. The client wants to know if they’re overpaying, and my job is to find the $500 million reason why they aren’t.
People always ask if the 100-hour work week is still a thing. The short answer: Yes, but it’s smarter. Thanks to the latest automation tools, I’m no longer spending five hours manually scrubbing data from 10-Ks. Our internal AI agents handle the grunt work of formatting and basic sensitivity tables. However, the “mental bar,” as we call it, has shifted. Because the machines are faster, the clients are less patient. They don’t want a deck that tells them what happened; they want a deck that tells them what will happen when interest rates move another 25 basis points in Q3.
The lifestyle is a grind, no doubt. My “morning” started at 7:00 AM with a call to the London office, followed by a series of internal huddles where our Managing Director (MD) tore apart three weeks of work in thirty seconds. But then there’s the adrenaline. When you’re sitting in a conference room overlooking the East River, negotiating the debt structure of a deal that will lead the headlines on Bloomberg tomorrow, the lack of sleep fades. You aren’t just moving numbers; you’re moving the needle of the global economy.
Is it the money? The year-end bonus is the carrot, sure. But at this level, it’s about the access. At 26, I’m in rooms with CEOs and CFOs who have been in the game longer than I’ve been alive. As I send the latest version of the “Project Phoenix” pitchbook to the printers for a 6:00 AM meeting, I catch a glimpse of the city lights. New York is quiet, but Wall Street never is. Time for one more espresso.