Ask HN: What's the best business to start in 2022?

Corporate tax accountants "earn" orders of magnitude more than janitors and nurses. Media puppets earn far far more than investigative journalists. Lawyers are respected more than teachers, in many ways. It's all absolutely batty.

That said, seems to me the best compensated people, with the least friction in their career, and with the least amount of overt evil done to society seem to be consultants. If you can start a consulting business in some field you can probably do well, financially at least.

I am not a consultant. From here though, it seems like they get paid astoundingly well by large companies that have no real way to measure the outcomes, so you just have to be confident and chipper and give people the feeling that you know what you're talking about and can help them.

Good luck!

Debatable. My friends at BCG have a HUGE carbon footprint as they fly around the world to site offices every week.

Starting a business is about seeing a problem, solution, and/or opportunity, and being able to execute it with domain expertise, all at the right time. Of course, it's also about grinding out sales leads and finding paying customers – a lot of is is sinking way more hours into it than you would sink into a 9 to 5.

I don't think this process is successful very often when we use the "daydreaming" method encompassed in the way your question is phrased here.

There aren't a lot of ways to "quit my job real quick." Most businesses are going to involve way more work than a day job, and the ideas can't just come out of thin air or from strangers on the Internet. Frankly, my advice to someone daydreaming is to just look around for more fulfilling salaried work.