You're doing perfectly fine and I admire your modesty. Actually, on a personal level I feel the same. I need a notebook, a table, a bed and a roof and I could not be happier.

But things change I life and with them your goals and maybe ambitions. I'm now reaching 40 years, have a wife and have 2 smaller kids. We had to move into a bigger house with more space. You also start to depend heavily on a car. I'm still a programmer like I was 20 years before, but now my priorities are different: I want financial stability. I want to spend as much time with my family as possible. I want more freedom regarding my schedule.

But unfortunately work does not allow me as much freedom as I would like to have. I need to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I have a tight schedule and am not really free to shift around my work how I see fit.

Well, the grass is always greener on the other side. If you are a founder you can reach financial stability much faster and you can organize your schedule (mostly) as you see fit. You can also increase your impact in this world if you run your own company. The big drawback is, that your workload will probably increase and you take on other risks in the process. (But these are things you can influence in one way or another).

Money has always been gamified. It's not so much about purchasing power, but about status - and in the big leagues, it's about political leverage.

VCs are really playing a status game, and the promise is that you too can become a high status player with a public profile and significant economic leverage. It's a completely traditional patronage relationship, based on the promise that if you win a round of the game, they will help you level up.

Ideally you both exit with a unicorn level IPO. That's a real win - for you, but also for them.

So this is not primarily about being able to afford to pay the bills. Or even about "changing the world" by providing a new kind of service. It's more like an economic and political sport.

A win leaves you with plenty of cash, but it also gets you entry to The Network, and eventually you may even graduate to coach yourself.

This is why VCs aren't interested in growing stable, unexciting, but productive businesses. Those are low-status beta plays, and no one ever became a thought leader by funding a small beer Wordpress consultancy - not even one that has been around for more than a decade, is comfortably profitable, and the business owners can afford to retire at 40.

The real stakes aren't money - although that's certainly a factor - but Network profile and reputation.

As a bootstrapper you can choose to play this game, or you can choose to ignore it. And ignoring it is perfectly legitimate. There's a huge amount of stress involved in going full SV, failure is far more likely than success, success is far more likely if you're already in or around The Network, and not everyone cares enough about the benefits to consider it a worthwhile tradeoff.

Anyone who does choose to play it should be aware of what they're getting into, and stories like OP's can do a lot to make the tradeoffs clearer.

I love your mindset and I am not too far off myself. For me it’s not about being able to buy luxuries but to “buy time”.

Time is - in my opinion - the most valuable resource that we have. Working for the man is trading your time with money given a specific conversation ( your salary ). I’d like to shoot to have a better conversation (I’m EU based and salaries here are not so great compared to the US) while not being tied to a specific location. With the plus of being able to work on whatever you fancy.

I think becoming rich is less about spending that money but more about the financial independence. So it’s not about not going to work but to don’t have to go to work.

It's probably because you're still young. More specifically (and here I'm guessing something about you), romantically unattached. Dating is a tough road to hoe if you can't or won't fund about half of a wedding and at least one of kids-and-a-house or traveling-the-world. Well, not dating exactly - you can get laid and even start relationships but in my experience the relationships will have a half-life and eventually fall apart in the face of increasingly unpleasant conversations about your lack of interest in the expensive stuff mentioned above.

Especially as a software engineer, I think, because ... hippies don't really like us that much, so there just aren't that many would-be ascetics out there willing to date us, and the people who do date us tend to pretty good at pegging their lifestyle expectations to a "leveled-up" career progression.

What you said is very subjective and is likely the product of the way you present yourself to the world.

Normal people want those things because they’re the things that society deems normal, but there are plenty of weirdos out there if you look.

Probably. I've always had kind of a dad vibe.

However in regards to your last clause, I said as much in my comment. "Finding weirdos" was less of a problem than "finding weirdos without a grudge against weirdos like me."

Maybe you just need to be hanging out with a better class of folks?

Not to be a dick, but if you find that you are attracting a certain type of person that you don't want to, then it's time for some introspection.

Oh, I'm married, with a kid.

What you're hearing is the result of introspection. At the end of the day it's easier (for someone privileged to be in this line of work) to just suck it up and make house-and-kid money than to date around looking for someone who wants to hitch their wagon to a slacker. And I really do love my wife and son to pieces

Good. Glad to hear that you're happy.

Its easy when you're young and single. Imagine you are married and want kids to go to a nice school - where would you live? How much does a house like that cost? (including bills like replacing roof, rebuilding kitchen etc etc)

Sounds like you are close to the philosophy of people like Mr. Money Mustache:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

What I found is:

> All I want is to make enough to cover my living costs and in my spare time work on side projects, code or tinker around. You know, do things that are actually fun to do and allow me to learn new stuff.

The side projects I'd like to do cost money, unfortunately. Not a fortune, necessarily, but enough that I need to be earning decently to afford to develop those side projects. And it is a fortune to build what I'd really like to. When I was much younger, pure software projects seemed enough. But ideas have a tendancy to grow :-)

Then there's time. As I got older, I realised the time I was putting into side projects was either not enough to build what I hoped to build, so slow that it become socially irrelevant by the time I did anything (others, paid, always had more time to put in), or it was seriously exhausting doing it at the same time as a job.

Over the years this built up into increasing dissatisfaction. When I was younger I had dreams and thought I'd gradually get around to some of them. As years passed by, I realised it's not going to happen for the bigger ones, and I'm sad, already mourning the loss of potential.

On top of all that, life adds major random events, which take major random time and money and all your personal energy for a few years. I don't think that's limited to younger or older people especially, but the longer you live, the more likely it is that major things happen at some time in your life, either to you or people you care about, which take over for a while.

I couldn't care less about profit or money personally, for its own sake. But I have dreams about things I want to make that are much more than just toy projects, and I want basic personal security. It turns out these aren't readily available after all, as I assumed when younger.

> If I have an idea i'm very passionate about I'd like to just share it with others because they might find it interesting

That's a reason to be careful who you work for.

You often can't freely share your most passionate ideas if your employer has a claim over them. And if you're working in a different field, to ensure that kind of claim doesn't hold water, limiting the time spend on a passionate idea to outside-of-work time is quite restrictive too.

All this is not necessarily an argument for founding a VC-backed startup, of course. But it's why just working for some company or other for a whole working life doesn't necessarily work if you have big ideas you're passionate about using.

ps. I wrote this as a contrast to the comments about how relationships, family, marriage, mortgage etc. will matter at some point. I think that comes over as a bit "you don't know now but one day you will have feelings for someone and they will expect you to spend money on them" I wanted to show something different, that happens even if you find a partner who is frugal like yourself, and doesn't cost anything :-)