[mbrock]

Random thought. People also do WANT a "romantic" or "interesting" or "passionate" life or whatever you want to call it. All the talk about "work/life balance" and "stable income" and stuff is uninteresting to this mentality because in one sense all it is is a preference for stability, a kind of conservatism. I know people who have abandoned career altogether to go around busking, and they LOVE the "hustle" even when it sucks in objective terms. They love the sense of urgency, the sense of being on their own space fighter like in Firefly. With funded startups it's a bit different because you still have daddy in the board room handing out your allowance, but that's secondary.

I can imagine someone semi-consciously optimizing their life in such a way as to avoid middle class normality as much as possible. If you want to get financially independent without doing "boring" stuff like working a stable career and investing in index funds, the notion of a wildly successful startup is perfect: you get to be interestingly poor for years, and then you can suddenly get fuck-off rich, with no intermediate period of dull stability.

Presumably after that you can go off and build canoes with your friends or whatever it is you "really" want to do. Except that probably, for reasons David and others outline, the plan will fail and drag you into decades of pure hypocritical misery.

[habitue]

This is an interesting thought, I like it

[deadlast]

You still have to be able to eat.