Tarpmaster Kashkari

Sometimes our modern age can feel so anchorless  that we long for something real to rid ourselves of the detached feeling. Often, the more our jobs deal with the abstract, the more we crave the concrete in our private lives. Neel Kashkari ran the infamous TARP program in Washington, DC. He didn’t ask for the job, and no one had ever had a job like it before.  And he worked in a very detached and thoroughly abstract world.

For a few brief months, Kashkari had more influence over the American economy than any individual had ever dreamed of having. He could save companies or let them lie in ruins. He was Bailout-in-chief and the Tarpmaster. On his shoulders were heaped the combined desires of Congress, two Presidents, and at the time, seemingly the fate of the United States itself.

The American taxpayers might cringe if they knew the truth. The $700,000,000,000 spent on the Troubled Asset Relief Program was really just a crapshoot at trying to save the financial system from melting down. The number itself, Kashkari recounts, was arbitrary:

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls [...] “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’

Washington Post (emphasis added)

You might think that bureaucratic appointees are just pencil-pushing robots, but not Kashkari. He made some of the most important decisions in the financial crisis, day after day, with no appreciable sleep. He gave everything he had to give to his country all at once, and then burned out completely.

He resigned after 7 months in office. Everyone in Washington now seemed to hate him. Congress hounded him and blasted him in congressional hearings. He was the face of TARP, an extremely unpopular (and misguided) effort. He was a wreck. His marriage was strained, he was now overweight, it was assumed that he skimmed a little bit of the $700 billion somehow, and he now hated DC more than it hated him.

So he moved to a remote location in the mountains of California with his wife, and decided to build a shed:

“I had to do something with my hands. It’s a big amorphous unknown — what’s going to happen to our economy. And the shed is solid, measurable. I can see it, I can touch it. It’s going to be around for the next 30 years. It’s the opposite of amorphous.”

Here, Kashkari has given us the truth. Those of us who live lives that are abstract, digital, intangible and “amorphous” can easily grow tired of the supposed sophistication that comes along with this life. Indeed, in many cases it seems as if there is something very unreal lurking within the modern structures we create for ourselves.

While some analyses may seem jarringly pretentious and feigned, the solution to modern man’s amorphism is easy. If you burn out on life, restart with what you know is real (physical objects and your family). Don’t try to do more than you can handle. Start simple. Appreciate what you have. Reorient your relationship to the world around you.

And most importantly of all, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can predict the future.