I don't know if I'm there yet. If anyone has any advice for me, I'm all ears.
I'm reminded of the King of the Hill episode "Orange You Sad I Did Say Banana?" where Kahn (who always wants to be rich) becomes convinced that the should be in touch with his roots and not want or care for money. In the end he realizes that the people trying to convince him not to be rich are the rich people and he was happier being true to himself.
I came out and told my friends during one of our talks about being "real" artists. Some of my friends stopped being friends with me and I got closer to one of my friends that felt the same way. (she never said anything before because she felt ashamed.)
The biggest changes have been that I've been happier and I make more money than I ever did. I don't feel like I "sold out" or any of that nonsense I hear from time to time. I moved across the country and I have no regrets.
The downside is that my happiness is probably tied a little more with money than it was before. It can be really hard to see the positive side of life when a large financial burden comes along or I lose my source of income. Overall I think it's been a net positive change. If nothing else I don't feel guilty anymore.
Some very useful insights. I'm currently working on the same for myself.
I care, though, about the fact that money brings me time, and as such more freedom to do whatever I like.
I do not know where you took that from...
Most of the people (EU-based) I know that are bootstrapping their own (profitable, not dead) startup or service seem to be minded similarly, too.
I just make sure I have enough money to not have to think about money, so it actually gets out of the way.
I care, though, about the fact that money brings me time, and as such more freedom to do whatever I like.
These two statements are contradictory. The whole point of having it is that it is stored value that can provide you with the things you actually need; time, in your case.
Similarly, I don't care much about H alone, but I definitely enjoy H2O!
However, if you did not have money, you would either:
a) Be comfortable living the most basic lifestyle humanly possible.
b) Be working so you can afford yourself the lifestyle you want.
Clearly, you are not in group A since you have a more than comfortable lifestyle, so it's B. You did contradict yourself.
Later you divide the whole humanity in A, B (and C). I certainly do not consider this is correct, and believe there are many more cases to be considered.
I cannot see what could possibly go wrong, going from here, in terms of deciding that people contradict themselves, logic, etc!
Feel free to consider I contradict myself - I certainly do not agree.
To which you replied (but edited later):
Okay thanks for pointing out exactly how I typed my
paragraph. Did you offer any sort of rebuttal? No. Stop
being a baby.
I'm now back to my regular schedule, arms uncrossed (I rarely cross them, mind you), actually. Have a nice end of day (sincerely).
Everyone his hobbies. If your hobby can land you some money so you can get a roof and some food, then you're already a good way to becoming an happy man.
I love to build cool shit. My salary does not matter to me. Of course, it is fairly high so perhaps I have the luxury to say that, but if my basic needs were taken care of, I'd be just about as happy just building things in Ruby.
In many cases I've found trying to monetize content makes it worse. Not always, but sometimes the right choice from an intellectual perspective is to improve an existing article somewhere else, whether by editing Wikipedia, or sending in corrections to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or sending a documentation-related pull request to a project on GitHub. The alternative, if I put monetization first, would be to always find a way I could "own" the content: it needs to be published on my domain, where I get the credit and SEO and personal-branding out of it, and can put AdSense or Amazon Affiliate links on it. Instead of fixing the Wikipedia article or the docs, write a linkbaity blog post mocking their errors, for example, and submit it to HN. Not as constructive, but many people do exactly that. Decisions that are good for monetization don't always magically align with non-monetary goals like improving publicly accessible information, and sometimes they're in direct conflict. In that case, I don't think it's necessarily laudable to prioritize monetization.