> freedom without financial margin is just anxiety with flexible hours.

What a great way of putting it. Especially with survivorship bias tending to highlight the cases that make it over that margin hurdle

As my grandfather would say “being self employed is great - you get to work whichever 80 hours a week you want.”

> The people who write the books, give the TED talks, and post the LinkedIn manifestos about “betting on yourself” are, by definition, the ones for whom the bet paid off.

> You don’t hear much from the ones who went back to traditional employment after three years of grinding, a depleted savings account, and a marriage that got stress-tested past its limits.

Check, check and nearly check. It was a choice between having a business and having a marriage. Easy choice in hindsight.

You can break up, or you can have a thousand fights. Why would you have a thousand fights? Well, so you can make peace. Having my own business, incidentally with my spouse, was the perfect conduit for those thousand fights. Holy hell in a handbasket. But: I've gotten to know them in a way I don't think I'd ever have reached without the business. I wouldn't change a thing. Except maybe getting a clue at the three year mark that this wasn't going to work instead of grimly hanging on to a dying dream for seven years.

Unemployment or dislike for authority also forced me to go into this

It's more like an occupation

"Survivors Are Loud; Statistics Are Quiet", is it just me or is that "Foo is Bar; Baz is (the opposite of) Bar" speech pattern one that LLMs prefer for weird reasons.

This is a observation, not a judgment.

(That would be another one: "This is a Foo, not a Bar")