I'm 28 and virtually every single male I talk to in their 20s has this deep resentment of working for a corporation. It personally used to resonate with me, but it turns out I like money much more than freedom.
- Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)
Advice given to a main character who's (spoilers?) smart and thoughtful enough to be deeply bored by and unhappy with anything like a normal career, while also easily doing well at such a job while hardly trying, but who also believes deeply that he's meant for something more artistic and intellectual and adventurous but is both entirely unmotivated to actually make that happen, and also probably not that smart.
And yes I felt attacked when I read the book :-)
If you own a business, can you really just take two weeks off and ignore your customers?
Can you just clock out after 8 hours?
Can you get sick or go on maternity/paternity leave and just come back to work to a functioning business?
Salaried work is highly appealing. It really doesn’t have to feel like corporate slavery.
If you have everything automated and your business is growing and customers are happy and loyal, well then you can take time off because by all indications you've put in a lot of hard work and intelligent design to achieve that.
For me, I actually enjoy the grunt work and the meetings and corporate BS in exchange for a quite stable paycheck and societal approval. It only leaves me with just enough free time for personal projects so that they can forever remain theoretical and unfinished and unfocused, as they deserve to be, because actual implementation into a robust and profitable platform is a quick way to kill personal interest in a subject ;)