Notes on Pressure

The sort of people who say “pressure makes diamonds” often own several varieties of motivational wall art, usually purchased from HomeGoods or perhaps Etsy. They arrange these sentiments in their home offices (never just offices) with the kind of careful precision usually reserved for preparing real estate showings.

Geologists, of course, would clarify with infinite patience: Diamonds require more than pressure. They need precise conditions—temperatures between 900 and 1,300 degrees Celsius, depths of at least 150 kilometers below Earth’s surface, and millions of years. Those who quote this wisdom rarely account for time, depth, or temperature. They think only of pressure, that great American virtue.

(I am thinking now of Sarah M., who kept a framed cross-stitch of this very phrase above her desk at Goldman. She had a nervous breakdown in 2019, during a particularly intense Q4. The cross-stitch stayed, a little crooked now, as others filled her role with mechanical efficiency.)

Consider the mathematics:

1. Number of carbon atoms crushed: billions

2. Success rate for diamond formation: fractional

3. Market value: artificially inflated

4. Human cost: incalculable

The metaphor falls apart under scrutiny, like so many certainties that dissolve between mirror-glass towers. Most carbon under pressure becomes nothing more than compressed failure. Workers in diamond mines understand this better than the motivational speakers who have never seen a mine, never felt the particular quality of darkness that exists 150 kilometers below affirmation.

In certain light—usually around 3 p.m. in fluorescent-lit offices, when the afternoon sun strikes windows at just the wrong angle—you can spot those who believe in pressure-made diamonds. They shine with a particular desperation, faces tight with the kind of smile that suggests they’re still waiting for their carbon to crystallize. They have yet to realize that they are not carbon; they are merely human—a far more fragile arrangement of elements.

The diamond district in Manhattan tells its own version of this story. Row after row of identical windows, each containing the end result of all that pressure—perfectly cut, perfectly graded, perfectly meaningless, unless you believe in the story. (We all believe in the story, to varying degrees. That’s rather the point.)

What they don’t tell you about diamonds: they can shatter along their cleavage planes with a single, well-placed strike. Rather like people, when you think about it. Quite like people, really.