Additionally, I am not certain that it is necessary to "eat junk food, sit at the PC all day, sleep on the couch" in order to build a business or change the world. Although it is romantic and might be doable for some people over the course of months and years, sacrificing (subjective) quality of life and sanity should not be the only path to building something meaningful that you care about. It will probably take a lot over work over the long haul. If the console cowboy lifestyle changes are the aspects of creating something that you/your wife are worried about, maybe address those separately from the goal of actually creating something, which I hope would not necessitate those behaviors.
"Masters of Doom" addresses this, I think, when it recounts how John Carmack stole an Apple II.
A master will always find a way. But his/her priorities may not always be shared or respected.
Did that help. I don't really have time for a whole book.
/the wife would get mad at me.
>In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.
He's making a larger point about low barriers to entry, but honestly there's something romantic about the image of all day cowboy coding sessions fueled by junk food.