> believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival

It's possible to survive without doing that - start your own business.

It's just tremendously more work to come up with a good and working business plan, and to find a funding source to help actualize that plan, when you're too good to "sell your time and dignity" to at least get seed money.

I don't get this mindset that the whole idea of working for someone else is degrading. Working for someone else is outsourcing a very tough part of business -- the strategy and funding -- to someone else. In exchange for this turnkey arrangement, you receive far less money than would a sole proprietor who managed to hatch the idea and deliver the same value on their own, successfully, but you also make far more money than the (zero or negative $) you would in the 90% likely scenario where your business fails.

Nobody is being forced to work for others -- but to get money you do have to provide value worth paying for to someone. Extreme self-sufficiency, owing nothing to anyone, is also an option -- you can get a loan and buy a few acres of farmland for less than a car and do your own thing there.

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hn_acc1 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed - I find I have very little creativity / vision (maybe too hard on my ideas), so I prefer to work hard for someone else, and let them get a ton of $$ in exchange for generally steady work and a pretty good life, all things considered.

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gridspy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you run your own business, you just have customers (and investors) instead of a boss. That still requires just as much social skill to navigate that relationship and the goals are often less clear.

I like the point you are making about being able to structure your own workplace and engage with the world on your own terms however.

	▲	heurist a day ago \| parent [-]
		I haven't run a business in a while but when I did I found I was actually more comfortable because the interactions are typically more scriptable and the dynamics are clearer than when you're dealing with peer employees. When you're dealing with customers, you're interfacing on behalf of the business and can adopt a 'business' persona while speaking about things you are expert in. Often you deal with people in bursts and don't need to interact with any given individual too often; with peers it's a lot more vague and confusing, and you're with them basically all the time for years so it's much more exhausting.