I am done. I give up

I find it interesting that you have called out "digital nomad influencers". You make it sound like at some point you believed them, which I would say is an alarm bell for a potential business leader, except you have then run some businesses.

Running a business is looking at what is happening and amplifying what works and fixing what doesn't. There is also an enormous amount of luck involved.

I suspect if you look at all companies, most people running them will have most of the skills needed, most will have had some kind of luck/lead/timing that made things work and all of them will think they know how to do business because of survivorship bias.

Even the most famous business leaders have had more companies fail than succeed but it is unbelieveably tiring unless you enjoy the journey, in which case, learn to stress less and keep working away.

When I at one point considered moving to the US, I did the numbers for UK and Norway, because I'm from Norway and live in the UK, and while Norway certainly came out higher in terms of tax than some US states, comparing with places I might be prepared to consider, like California, the difference was small enough it'd be more than eaten up by health insurance before considering the other costs of a reduced welfare system (e.g. needing a far bigger cushion in case of unemployment, far higher childcare costs etc.)

Your mileage will of course vary a lot depending on specifics, and especially which US states you compare with.

I don't think this way of looking at it is helpful either.

Sometimes the rich kid was abused by his dad and it ate him up inside and he turned to drugs and died of an overdose at 25 years old.

Sometimes the middle class kid came from a father that survived as a child in WW2 with undiagnosed metal scars to prove it.

Sometimes the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad then starts and scales a business up to millions in sales.

We don't live in North Korea. A great deal of your future in a country in the west is based on how hard you try and, yes, some intangibles that are beyond your control, but it's no where close to "the rich kid kept buying darts until he won while one in fifty middle class kids actually made it."

Furthermore, entrepreneurship is just one of many hard games. And yes, the rich have an advantage at this specific game and less so because of their access to money and more so their access to their parents that are often successful at navigating society for capital formation. But the rewards of being a successful founder are pretty limited. Slightly better tasting wine. Larger hotel rooms. Softer sheets.

When you actually add up all the real benefits of winning at forming a company, you'll find that they pale in comparison to other games, many of which are easier, but some of which are harder or MUCH harder.

People today barely remember who Rockefeller is. He's the name a fancy building near the middle of the city to most people. That will be Bill Gates. That will be Steve Jobs. That will be so many of our supposed HN heros. If humanity makes it a couple hundred years, more people will remember Putin and Biden. Their games are harder. They ultimately matter more. And if legacy is more important than threadcounts then their rewards are much larger.

I think it is more important to find out what is true and what is false and to embrace the truth and help others than it is to win at business. And if it matters at all to you, I've founded a couple of failed companies and one that was acquired and I still think tech entrepreneurship can be a good thing, but only to a point.

I like that you are not dismissing bootstrapping, but just wishing that people dismissive of VM should have that disclaimer.

I just wanted to provide a counter-example: Bootstrapping worked for me, but I was ready to live happily on 1800€ per month (France, where it’s reasonable), and remain small. It also required being able to part from anyone who would think 500€ a day for a consultant is reasonable, or that 20€/u/m is ok for a SAAS app.

Success is an addiction that many people long to suffer from. It’s just an illusion for all but a fraction of those try to roll the boulder up the hill.

Comfort is what we should all learn to settle for. It’s really not that bad.

Learn to be happy and fulfilled where you’re at. Life is short, enjoy it.