I did this and my advice would be “it depends”. It’s been a mixed bag. Financially I’m much worse off than I would have been staying at my 300k job (who knows what it would have grown to now?). I will say the stress of not knowing what you are doing and questioning yourself can be immense. That being said perhaps I’m not the best example as I took years off living a hedonistic lifestyle and truly adopted the YOLO mentality. I consulted here and there. It was fun but ultimately draining.

The corporate coding lifestyle can be without a doubt an existential mind fuck. It partially depends on your mindset and job responsibilities though. If you care about the purpose of your product, you aren’t some product managers code monkey, and you are making money that isn’t the worst thing.

That being said... FOR ME I have learned that the concept of retirement is a joke. It’s not all that great and at least for me people feel better having a meaningful purpose. Even if your purpose is make believe I think it’s neCessary. So I wonder about the utility of doing something you hate for 30 years just to end up “retired” and miserable anyway. That’s what I’m trying to do, I don’t want to retire but I don’t want to sit in front of a computer coding up some app UI for someone else. but I have a family on the way so we’ll see how it goes.

I think maybe optimize for that purpose you have in mind for yourself rather than starting a business just for the hell of it. If you are getting paid 500k by google to prosecute child pornographers that’s likely going to make you feel better than starting your own 1 man SaaS business running email marketing....

It depends.