Really thoughtful article about balancing money with other things, purposelessness and self-discovery as a path to creativity, and creativity as a business strategy. All the things he talks about that relate to my experiences are dead on. I've had similar thoughts about keeping any business I start private, and bootstrapping instead of seeking VC funding. Who wants to optimize for current needs, or short term profits? I would much rather give people something they can't even describe until they see it for the first time. If it weren't for mathematicians who were mostly motivated by aesthetics, we wouldn't even have computers.

It's interesting that he describes having a kid as a way of avoiding or delaying self-exploration. I've found that self-exploration has been one of the hardest things I've done, but by far the most helpful, although I think that outside of solving personal problems the line between self-exploration and other sorts of exploration starts to blur. It's really about the exploration of appealing ideas for reasons that one probably can't explain to anyone else.