Sam Polk was one of the wolves of Wall Street. In a self-lacerating memoir in Sunday’s New York Times, Polk looks back at his time as a brash young trader and is disgusted with the person that he used to be. “I was a giant fireball of greed.” “I wanted a billion dollars.” “I was lying to myself.”  I, I, I.

Despite the pretty blondes, the NoHo loft, ready entrée to Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurants, and second-row Knicks tickets on speed dial, nothing could make up for the “inner wound,” the spiritual hole that couldn’t be plugged with piles of easy money. Like his fellow “wealth addicts” on the trading floor, Polk was convinced that being rich would solve all of his problems. It didn’t, and he eventually left the wolves’ den (but not before making a killing by short-selling derivatives during the financial crisis).

On first glance, Polk’s harrowing narrative seems like a scathing indictment of neoliberalism. He praises the contributions of working people like his mother, a nurse practitioner, while equating traders and financiers with junkies, always on the lookout for the short-term fix instead of the long-term interests of the system as a whole. But though he’s left Wall Street behind, Polk has not been nearly as successful in escaping the affective and ideological spaces of neoliberalism.