It doesn't require capital. You can do it without involving other people. You don't need profit motivation. You can complete projects without the requirement that they produce enough income for you to survive off of. No deadlines. Less responsibilities. Quitting doesn't hurt other people. If you enjoy writing poetry you're also saving the money you would have spent paying for dopamine.

Edit: It's very difficult to move ideas towards better ideas if the only feedback is silent negativity. Was the question I responded to supposed to be rhetorical?

Heh, no it wasn’t. I’m honestly curious what people think, and your points seems like potential explanations to me, so I don’t know why you’re being downvoted,

Nothing about your reply has anything to do with why a person might create poetry.

The person I responded to asked why someone would choose Poetry over Business.

Can you really, honestly, read what I wrote and say that I didn't try to come up with reasons why someone would choose Poetry over Business?

When I read what you wrote, in conjunction with this defensive post asking me to speculate as to what you were trying to do, I think of the OP's question as a question on an exam and your reply as the work of a student familiar with the concept of "business" and utterly unaware of the concept of "poetry."

Regulations. Plain and simple.

Your employees aren't allowed to work their asses off. They're going to expect to be able to get to work at 10, and be home by 5.

> Your employees aren't allowed to work their asses off.

Strict labour laws don't really prevent this in practice, if someone _wants_ to work themselves to death they can (I've worked with a remote team from Poland before while I was in Australia. Despite Poland having far strong labour laws than Australia, some members of the Polish team voluntarily worked longer hours and just didn't report it).

What labour laws do is prevent employers from forcing employees to work crazy hours. I think it's largely a cultural difference in the end. I live and work in the US now and here I've noticed the general sentiment that employees should be thankful to have a job and so should do whatever their employer says. It's also important to realise that highly compensated tech employees are less susceptible to this needing to work insane hours because we have much better leverage, but that doesn't stop people self-imposing longer hours due to cultural differences.

I'm not talking about big companies. The question is about poetry vs side projects which in the US bloom into startups.

So again, 1) there are more regulatory barriers to making the side project => startup jump, and 2) finding both people who are okay with working early stage company hours and finding work arounds to fairly compensate them is much harder.

Huh? You can be an employee and have a side project independent of your boss.

Depends on your employment contract.

(OK, so given the general vibe I don't expect Europe to have the same kind of repugnant clauses I've seen elsewhere, but...)

I'm more talking about the difficulty associated with going from side project to fledgling company.

In the US you just slap up a Delaware Corp, use basically standard documents for it's structure and ownership and you're off to the races.

Is it that easy in Europe?

It is in the UK - go to Companies House, either buy a defunct company name or register a new one, enter your details and some info about what the company will do, pay a small fee {about £25 if you're using an existing name, a bit more otherwise), done. You'll get the basic Articles of Association, share certificates etc in the post, or just download them IIRC.

What if I personally prefer to work a bit longer every day, but retire a bit earlier?