Arguably a lot of people are driven to be entrepreneurs because of the status.

The issue with the bankers is that they’re trapped in a local maximum.

A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS.

I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on more financial risk to do so).

Look at “30 under 30” lists, accounts on Twitter and their bios, there’s massive amounts of status seeking there. I suspect the successful low status people are actually the standard devs/IT employees, not founders.

An annoying part of this game is that it’s also high status to pretend you’re low status or that you don’t care about status (hence all the “I’m humbled to accept <high status achievement>”)

Dating is always awkward, doesn’t really matter what you’re doing (except maybe doctor).

> A successful entrepreneur is probably the highest status role possible in modern society (think Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates) maybe even rivaling POTUS.

Not even close. Regardless of the high esteem we may hold them in, the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks. Compare and contrast with say Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio who, to use a stock phrase, men want to be and women want to be with.

I don't think actors and celebrities 'famous for being famous' are held in such high esteem anymore. I think that peaked in the oughties, and that the profession's renown's been in a slow decline since. This may in part be due to how replaceable and commoditized their industries have made them.

The average person may lust after famous person 'x', or be jealous of their resources. They may even follow them as a sideshow. But I've met very few people who want to be a celebrity, or admire more than one or two for their contributions to the world.

Celebrities may be able to capture our attention better, but put your average celebrity next to a reasonably successful entrepreneur, and ask the average person which is more praiseworthy, or admirable, and I think the entrepreneur will win 80% of the time (I say 80% of the time, because I'm certain a small number of high-level athletes and musicians break that rule)

Covid-19 really killed the celebritainment industry. They have to stay in the public mind to stay relevant. A movie will have a press push, some celebrities need scandals. The only celebrity we hear about consistently now is POTUS... and he is sort of a black hole in his own universe.

Status depends on the social hierarchy. In the modern world, we are fortunate to exist in more than one social hierarchy, and can potentially choose which to be in. You have your workplace, family, local gym, neighborhood, online community, etc., and can have different statuses in each.

I think attractiveness confounds a comparison between Brad Pitt/Leonardo DiCaprio with Zuckerberg, Bezos and Gates. Is there an actor who isn't considered highly attractive that you think the average person would hold in significantly higher regard than successful tech entrepreneurs?

Jack Nicholson comes to mind. And Mick Jagger is ugly as sin and that doesn’t hurt his status.

I'm sorry but none of them are even remotely classifiable as ugly. Have you seen photos of younger Mick Jagger?

Young Mick Jagger could be a successful female model in 2020

It's interesting you should mention that, because successful female models are orders of magnitude lower status today than they were 25 years ago. Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Tyra Banks, to name a few, were massively high status, on the level of professional athletes and movie stars. Nowadays, not so much.

> because successful female models are orders of magnitude lower status today than they were 25 years ago.

No, they aren't.

> Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Tyra Banks, to name a few, were massively high status, on the level of professional athletes and movie stars.

So are Chrissy Teigen, Bella and Gigi Hadid now. Kendall Jenner, too, though more in the style of an athlete that is an massive on-the-field standout that takes every opportunity to generate negative attention off the field.

Tom Hanks?

Status is relative. Going with the dating analogy:

Girls who are into IT will view Zuckerberg as higher status vs. Brad Pitt.

A girl who's into acting acting will view Brad Pitt as more 'high status' than Zuckerberg.

I think you may have confused "modern society" with TechCrunch/other mainstream tech publications. If this was a politics community, someone would probably say that "modern society considers Biden" as someone with the highest-status role.

I think we under-appreciate the role of context when we talk about status.

>the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks.

gp has only listed tech entrepreneurs. Shocking as it may seem to us, the tech industry doesn't have a stellar reputation in some parts of the US/world. However we also have e.g. Donald Trump who ran on his identity as a "businessman" (however farcical), Elon Musk, or Oprah ( http://blackeconomics.co.uk/wp/oprahs-empire/ ), all appealing to different sorts of people, but their business acumen is not unnoticed nor unmentioned in each case.

Trump ran on his identity as Trump. The man successfully "built his personal brand" before that was even a thing. I don't know of an earlier example of "famous for being famous" either. He really is in a class by himself and he objectively proved that by winning the Presidency of the United States. One can actively dislike his personality and policies while still being honest enough to acknowledge his cultural impact.

Trump may be famous for being famous, but the idea of him being a business magnate has always been a core part of that image. That doesn't detract from the significance of his ability to appeal to people far from the usual coterie who read the Economist and who knew about the Trans-Pacific Partnership before 2015, but it does support the original argument that "entrepreneur" qua "business[wo]man" can be a gateway to high social status.

Yeah that’s a good point, I wasn’t thinking of more classic celebrities like actors, musicians, and famous athletes.

Being a business person is the ultimate status symbol in the USA. Look at our current president: he was elected because of his perceived "business prowess." Had he been considered merely a reality TV host, he would not have been elected.

If you think about it, it's odd that we even know the names of business leaders. But, I bet the typical American could name F500 CEOs than they could famous painters.

> I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on more financial risk to do so).

Trying to group all entrepreneurs together, I think, is a huge mistake.

I've definitely seen status driven entrepreneurs. Some of them are amazing.

But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, that could not accept humanity embarrassing itself so poorly, and who could not live with a planet that had so much wasted potential. And who responded. Who ventured forward, to make at least some data points, where humanity was doing it right. These people DNGAF about status, they only care about trying to generate some good, creating some value.

> But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, that could not accept humanity embarrassing itself so poorly, and who could not live with a planet that had so much wasted potential.

Yeah me too, Eliezer Yudkowsky comes to mind - there may be others but I think they're quite rare. Even in these cases I suspect status is some component though not the driving force (how much of a role it plays I think varies depending on the person and what they value).

People want to do something important/have purpose - I think it's hard to disentangle this from status because it's so tied up in how we see ourselves and what we often consider important. Millions of years of selective pressure and social behavior/hierarchies of intelligent primates can't really just be ignored.

There are some outliers, but I'm generally skeptical. I tend to think often the DNGAF persona is done because it's a signal of high status to not care about your status. I suppose at some level it's real though.

> Yeah me too, Eliezer Yudkowsky comes to mind - there may be others but I think they're quite rare.

Yudkowsky is not an entrepreneur, he's primarily a philosopher (regardless of his disdain for other philosophers) and secondarily an artificial intelligence researcher. Among philosophers and researchers, it's not hard to find someone who wants to improve humanity.

> Arguably a lot of people are driven to be entrepreneurs because of the status.

and it was a lot more fun doing it when it had no status at all.

This reminds me of the book "Excellent Sheep" that spoke to the point that much of elite schools is about chasing status. I couldn't find the exact number, but an absurd percentage of graduates go into a select few high prestige career choices, namely finance, consulting, law, and medicine. The point being students are optimizing for high status.

To paraphrase an interaction from the book about entertaining different paths, when pressed a student made it clear: "We've known who we want to be from elementary school. We are the type to get into <<Ivy League School Name>>".

I sometimes wonder if people focus on chasing status when they're at a loss for defining any other concrete goal. When you aren't sure what you want, it's easy to let society define your goal which manifests itself as chasing status.

> “...the point that much of elite schools is about chasing status.”

it’s important to note that everyone is chasing status, and that status is (highly) multidimensional, so we can all have it along different dimensions. i’d go so far as to posit that status has more degrees of freedom than the number of people. it isn’t zero-sum by any means. “high-status schools” is just one of those dimensions, perhaps one that’s more visible than others.

>it’s important to note that everyone is chasing status

While I do think that is the general rule since humans are social animals, I'm curious as to why you don't think there are exceptions. By definition, to chase status means to pursue things that society values. It seems to me there are certain people who do not chase such things because they have value systems that don't align with the society they are a part of. Perhaps I can agree if we lax the assumption on what defines a society. If your family or a church is sufficient as a "society" I could agree, but I was using a larger definition to include people one wouldn't know on a personal level.

>status has more degrees of freedom than the number of people.

I don't know if I'd go this far. Status is by definition relative social standing and thus defined by the society at large. It can be relative between cultures (some societies may give teachers more status than lawyers and vice versa) but it can't really be relative within a culture and still meet that definition of aggregate consensus. Naturally, within cultures some dimensions will be more valued than others as the ones that give prestige.

but that’s just the point, when you break down social structures into finer and finer units (the individual, at the limit), you realize that status has all sorts, and is relative to many social groups. hence, the position that statuses outnumber people through both the multidimensionality of social groups as well as the multidimensionality of status itself.

a singular global social order is a fiction we don’t have to choose to believe.

Personally, I think that extreme relativistic stance waters down the idea of "social" status to be meaningless because it negates the social aspect. At that point, it's no different than saying "people chase what they value". That's trivially obvious; the chasing of social status is a subset criteria meant to say "people chase what they value, and what they value is social standing defined by their desired in-group". That can be quite different because the trivial condition can have people chasing all sorts of non-socially minded goals. Regardless, the original point was that when people can't concretely define what they value, they often defer to chase that which their society values.

Using a "singular global social order" is a bit of a straw man. It doesn't have to global, just like it can't be individual.

> "Using a 'singular global social order' is a bit of a straw man. It doesn't have to global, just like it can't be individual."

and again, that's the point. neither extreme is realistic, but we have a bias toward one that we should actively compensate for. most of our esteem derives for the few hundred to a few thousand people that forms our social system, but our thinking tends to stray to where we stand in the wider, unfathomable society. it's a component of why social media tends to be corrosive rather than creative and supportive.

Maybe, but that's not been my experience. I've found people tend to value the social standing of that "few thousand" people that make up their immediate society rather than the global collective. If anything, I've noticed a tendency to rail against the massive collective value because of it's juxtaposition to that of the value system closer to home.

As a silly example, a giant pickup is a status symbol in cattle country while a tesla is a status symbol in some parts of CA. Both sometimes look down their nose at the other. I'm not making a case as to which is correct, just that I doubt people make their value judgement in response to some global society.

Since I have little presence on social media, I may just not have a good handle on how that skews the whole dynamic but it certainly feels more locally biased to me.

i'd suggest that the subject of status schools (the takeoff point of this discussion) is itself a global appeal to status, rather than an immediate one. most people who place high status on them have no real idea why, just that they have such reputations. the very comparison of 'truck vs tesla' depends on a global, and contentious, notion of status.

this bias is especially pervasive in, and because of, the modern connected society. how do we contend with extreme interconnectedness? that, the contention (and potential resolutions) of a global social network, will be a defining feature of our times to future historians i think.

>most people who place high status on them have no real idea why, just that they have such reputations.

I think this is a very good point and it reminds me of discussions during my undergrad days.

>the very comparison of 'truck vs tesla' depends on a global, and contentious, notion of status.

This is the opposite point I was making about the status of each being non-global in nature.

As I've moved around the country, I've come to realize the local effects on university status. Some schools, like those Ivy League institutions are almost universally revered. Others seem to have local reverence that doesn't translate well. I've lived in some areas where the local universities have a supremely high status for reasons that aren't valued elsewhere (athletics comes to mind -- some schools are 'great' because they have a good football team while having an almost non-existent basketball program and vice versa. It's a bit strange to me how this can confer status to students who only interact with the programs as spectators. Academics similarly; having an MIT degree confers status even if it was in liberal arts). Outside of that local bubble, people put almost no stock in said school but within that bubble it carries a lot of status if it's on your resume because of local cultural (i.e. societal) bias. And people seem to make choices more biased by their immediate social group. As you allude to, much of it seems to simply be inertia of what the herd mind reinforces. It's high status simply because everyone has agreed it's high status. But I still contend that requires a reasonably large social component biased by the local bubble.

It will be interesting to see in the coming decades if social media dilutes those local effects.

Anecdotally when I was in college I remember doing a lot of observing of all the kid in various programs. I distinctly remember thinking all my pre-law friends and acquaintances seemed to be really looking for something... at the time I thought they were looking for "who they are", but status actually makes a lot more sense, even if it is a bit of "who they are" as well.

That's not a judgment about them good or bad, just something that seemed to stick out to me about many of them.

>People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week.

This hits hard.

Whenever I think I want to do something, I try to seriously think about whether it’s something I want to do, or something I want to have done. Working on side projects and companies is something I enjoy actually doing, while for a lot of the status-seeking types it’s usually something they want to have done and finished successfully. Similarly I sometimes think I want to write a book, but I really just want to have written a book, which is a very different thing.

Interesting. I do all side projects because I want to have done them. I don't really enjoy doing them, but they bring benefit to someone, and that might be worth my time. I'm thinking of writing a book for the same reason; I know I'll be miserable writing it, but having done that, it'll look great on my CV, and might bring me some benefits.

For me, most of the worth to be doing category is stuff I don't enjoy, yet I do it anyways for the long-term gain.

That’s fine as long as you have balance and remember to do other things for fun too and not live all your life doing projects like that, because ultimately at the longer term there is nothing and you may have huge regrets of not having truly lived.

> People considered me to be quasi-unemployed

On a related note, this is a mindset that I think is probably the biggest blocker to entrepreneurial success (and perhaps happiness?)

I have a friend (you know who you are since you’ll probably read this ;) who is by ALL measures a massively successful and brilliant person. Ran his own startup for 10+ years, just had a great exit. And during his post-sale victory lap in which he took a much-needed burnout recovery break, STILL began to refer to himself as “unemployed” in the context of worry over what to do next.

“Employed” / “Unemployed” is a mindset that’s been engrained into people for hundreds of years, so I can’t blame others for applying it to entrepreneurs. But I think it’s a limiting frame of reference and holds a lot of people back.

I prefer "gainfully unemployed" or "willfully unemployable". Those are the labels I have become comfortable with.

I've started using the term "Mitt Romney unemployed" for "not working but no pressing need to", as a reference to his famous gaffe about "I know all about unemployment! Heck, I'm unemployed, myself!"

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/06/17/romney-ribbe...

Why not just stick to the classic "idle rich"?

It’s for when the person isn’t necessarily idle. I mean, in the namesake example, running for President is, like, the opposite of idle. It’s just not generating wage/salary income.

Edit: and even if “idle” in that sense is assumed to mean the previous sentence, that’s still counterintuitive and misleading.

That's a good alternative!

Personally, I don't even go there. By all measures, I haven't been "employed" since the late 90s (when I was briefly an employee of an investment bank for a summer internship). I've run my own businesses, helped others build theirs, worked as a consultant, and done nothing at various times for the past 20 years.

Rather than describe my state of being as "employed" vs "unemployed", I always break it into "working on a project for someone else" vs. "working on my own project" (and sometimes both, and sometimes neither.) Some of those projects generate money. Some of them don't.

It's taken some time, but people get it! I just refuse to play the game :)

What are your thoughts on simply “self-employed”?

The German word for "self-employed" is "selbstständig", which can also mean "independent". That would be the perfect word for describing nih's situation.

I think that's probably the best to explain to others. Easy answer, truthful, and fits into the mold that many people think about.

I had a friend once refer to it as “funemployed”. I loved the term, though I still prefer to refer to intentional and willful breaks from employment as sabbaticals.

Interesting that your alternative to the socially acceptable work status, is a socially acceptable non-work status that still implies you're doing something.

It's that underlying implication that you must always be striving for something, even meditation is in service to being a better self, vacations aren't fun, they're recharging the batteries / destressing, all of the implied 'be working toward something or you're worthless' assumptions that just frustrate me even more.

The term is interesting. In some circles it seems to have a message of "yes the economy sucks but I'm not worried about being unemployed because I'm in a stable enough situation for some amount of runway/indefinitely, so please don't stress yourself by worrying about me."

It's a privileged term to use in some ways because of the so very many in dire financial situations right now. But among friends or family or certain situations, it has its uses.

Sabbatical implies you are working on something else though, so seems to me quite different than "funemployed".

I didn't realize there was that connotation.

If that is the case, funemployed would be the more appropriate term.

To me sabbatical meant, taking time off to focus on oneself or ones own pursuits, however I didn't realize there was a work or growth related connotation to the word.

Sabbatical is often still associated with universities where students or professors take time off from their regular duties to pursue some other activity in a remote region. This is typically, but not always, associated with their normal duties, such as a biologist that lives in the rain forest for a year to conduct research. This made more sense in the past, when travel was long and expensive.

It can mean just an extended break from work, but the connotation to most is that the break is used to engage in another project that your day job constrains in some way. It also implies that you will return to your previous duties afterwards.

The trend is to call a temporary leave of absence from your job to do whatever a "career break."

Does it? I always thought of it as a burnout recovery (sometimes paid) with guaranteed reinstatement.

It does in my experience.

This may be biased by my academic background where a sabbatical year is typically one where you would have no teaching duties so were free to travel to another university to work with a new group, explore a new field, finish a manuscript, etc. Expectation is that you are working, but not your routine work.

I've heard it used similarly outside academic contexts and when it was not something you were contractually guaranteed - e.g. "I took a year off my job to finish my book" , but never in the sense of "I took a year off my job to go surfing".

So i guess I think of it as a formalized break from your work routine where you do something else productive with the expectation of going back to that work afterwards.

Of course "productive" here is a bit slippery.

Yes I can totally agree with this, and it can be amplified by your environment, especially in HK where we're pretty much all slaves to our mortgages. I worked in ib and actually quit after I was relocated to Shanghai. My colleagues were a lot more understanding because you could actually feel the pace of technological change a lot more acutely than in a place like Hong Kong. But still most of them would never have the guts to do it themselves, they lose too much for a totally uncertain future and probably wouldn't make it anyways.

And yea I also lived like a bum for a few years after that but I never really cared as much for fine food or whatever it is stuffy banker types lived for anyways

I mean, as a lowly software engineer that just makes a decent income, I won't do it either, for the same reasons.

Sure would be nice to be able to pay for passable housing & health care while I'm trying to create. The burn rate is too damned high.

#vanlife is a nice escape fantasy, for this ultra-hostile expensive world we live in.

No no no, tell them they CAN be an entrepreneur by just giving you $MONEY for $IDEA with $LAX legal terms.

Edit-But more seriously - I totally agree. It is infinitely more difficult to accept a low position for that long to the point of impossibility for many already otherwise established.

> Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur.

They mean a rich, powerful, famous entrepreneur, not an intrepid voyager living by their wit and instincts to do something that changes the world.

What you tell them is spot on.

So most entrepreneurs want to spend their lives living out of their car?

Rich, powerful, and famous is probably the end goal for most entrepreneurs.

That's ironic because most of the tech founders I meet these days do it for the status, and just pretend to be entrepreneurs.

Q: What do you call the founder and CEO of a 1-2 person company that failed and went bankrupt?

A: Founder and CEO.

Most people would call them unemployed.

Calling oneself Founder and CEO doesn't have much, if any, cachet outside of the tech world, since on its own it doesn't mean anything. What matters is what you actually did at the failed company.

You know what a plumber in charge of a plumbing company calls himself?

A plumber.

A few years ago I was asked to present at an alumni event. Afterwards I met with groups of students.

It had been a very long day, and after the sixth or seventh group of students that met with me completed their "I'm the CEO, this is the CTO, this is the CMO, this is the COO... on, and this is our engineer" speech I looked at the CEO and accidentally snapped "Well, I guess you've learned an important lesson about how meaningless these titles are."

So I agree with you - the pretentious titles hold very little cachet, and not just outside the tech world, but inside it as well. No one is actually impressed at the zero-experience CEO of his own company until he proves something even in tech.

I'm in a relatively high status career, followed that just right path, and more or less planned it all out since middle school. For what its worth, I don't give a crap about status. I think most of my peers don't either, at least relative to the past. I think materialism and arbitrary status seeking is one the decline for the young professional. High end professional fashion and fancy watches are nowhere to be seen in my office (well, pre-covid at least). Sure, there's social media doing its thing, but in the grand scheme of things it's importance to the average person's self image is small.

I do care about access to high paying wages with work that gradually grows more high level over time. I do think working at a startup could be more fun, but I don't think it'd be a good idea worth doing, ever, given what I've got now.

I am happy with what I've got. I make a chunk less than $200k, which isn't close to the very top tiers, but it's way more than I need. Yeah, probably could have gotten even more going a CS FANG route or a lucrative start up that just works. But personally I think everything more or less went as planned and I think that's great.

I wouldn't go assuming that folks in similar positions aren't aware of the calculus here either. If someone says running a startup sounds really interesting, that's because there's a lot of cool stuff in it. The same could be said of being a commercial fisherman, or being a detective, or running a small restaurant. I mean running a small restaurant sounds awesome. But it also probably sucks. If someone asks me about it, I'm likely to focus on the positives. I'm not exactly being asked to sign my name on a career form here. If you decide to call me out on not actually wanting to drop my lucrative career for that startup/restaurant/fish boat, that's not me being sheepish, that's me trying to downplay an uncomfortable situation coupled with an apparent assumption that I'm unaware of my own vanity for status :/

> High end professional fashion and fancy watches are nowhere to be seen in my office

Status symbols drastically change between generations. The question is: what are the status symbols of your peer group?

My impression is that as you move up in earnings (or perhaps with age?), the symbols of status become more esoteric.

One female friend of mine wants to start a yoga studio: that appears to me to be a particularly alpha-female status seeking activity in her social circle.

And the definition of what are status symbols is extremely dependent upon the group, and the symbols are not always visible or obvious. One symbol that seems invariant between different cliques (although somewhat recursive) is having a high status partner.

The clearest status symbol across different groups is whether high status individuals within the group (or globally high status people) spend time with you. Name dropping. Audience seeking.

>High end professional fashion and fancy watches are nowhere to be seen in my office

Do you think the status drive is the same, just replaced with different signals?

I've often wondered if a lot of it is almost generationally defined. Boomers grew up in a time where cars were a major status symbol, but there's a high percentage of younger generations that don't even care to own a car. Based on what you stated, I wonder if the materialism has just been replaced by an experiential sense of status (e.g., who has the best Instagram-worthy vacation to share, or who has the coolest start-up story to tell, or the most 'artisan' career). I'm not claiming to know, just curious if these are just different means to the same end defined as the esteem of our collegues

This may be coming hard from my particular beliefs, but I think its a byproduct of diversification efforts bearing fruit. It used to be all white dudes or non-white dudes playing the white dude game. I think the diversity of people in visible traits has encouraged diversity in viewpoints and norms and whatever. It's much easier to play your own game when it's 1v1v1v1v1v1 instead of 4v1. Norms are softer. And that's good.

There's definitely some sort of anti-materialism cultural movement. I don't know how to judge the instagram status game. It's big, and growing, but it's also totally optional. You don't come off as a low status individual if you don't even have an instagram account to the same degree as someone who walks in with a non-professional looking pair of shoes.

If nobody knows what my insta-status is (as a non user), and I don't know what anyone else's is... is it really a good measure of status or is it just kind its own thing? Aside from the top few percent of individuals who are basically professional social media players, I'm not sure insta-fame amounts to much more than being a guild master in a particularly popular MMORPG. Kind of cool but hardly universal.

> As a bootstrapped founder when I was younger, even dating was awkward. People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week.

It is awkward-- and frankly, unhealthy-- to be working 80 hours a week. That's what people in cults do.

> Folks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening.

> Then they sheepishly admit that this is true.

That might be less about agreement and more about politely getting the guy who's being deliberately discouraging to shut up.

There's a time and a place for it, but I feel like much stronger friendships are formed by people who can handle giving and receiving a bit of negativity / harsh reality now and then.

The superficiality of modern positivity obsession is a source of a lot of problems, because people don't have a tight-knit network who will be there for each other through thick and thin.

The phrase I always tell them, you wont do it specifically doesn't strike me as the words of the helpful, skeptical voice of reason, but perhaps I'm reading too much into a careless phrasing. It sounds to me like the words of a superior know-it-all douchebag, not the hard-nosed, skeptical advice of a worthwhile friend. YMMV.

>> Then they sheepishly admit that this is true.

So even some of the most successful high statis people are caving in to outside pressure to be something other than what they want. Problem is, the benefits of that (money, status, maybe power) are nice thing to have even if they're not your goal.

this is where the term "golden handcuffs" comes from. You want to do something else but the current situation is too good to risk.

Does entrepreneurship have to be a 80 hour week full time all-or-nothing commitment? What of those passive income advocates that talk about slowly building revenue streams on the side?

I think that's a different goal, they want to be quasi unemployed with money, surfing at the beach in Bali.

I'd love to have a passive income so that I can worry less about my expenses while having a regular 9-5 job that I already have.

Sounds like a stereotype to me; many people would love to have passive income for many different reasons I'm sure.

"As a bootstrapped founder when I was younger..."

How long were you willing to work for someone else before you became a founder?

Status takes many forms.

By reasonable measures of success they are succesful, arent they?

How did you survive initially without a steady source of income?