Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?
It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.
That sentence was followed by 'Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce.'. So, if you don't struggle for survival, and don't have to work hard, and are not hit by adversity, and not forcely married to a person you don't like, then you may be happy. That seems a reasonable assumption considering the objective of the essay.
To some people, the pain of letting the money go is greater than the perceived benefit of the product/service they get in return for the money, most of the time. You can imagine such people accumulating money all their life. For them, FIRE would be a very attractive proposition.
> For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible
Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.
Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky
1. Drop files from a file browser
2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month.
3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor.
4. Have the same experience on all devices
5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye.
6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content.
7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.
Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.
Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.
I use Google Keep for saving anything I find interesting online. There's a chrome extension that you can use to do it from the browser. It allows you to write some text around the link/text you are saving. I write enough text so that I am able to find it by searching. I also give one standard label to these notes so these are not mixed up with other Keep notes for tasks, book notes etc.
Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had it will be ridiculous to read.
I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.
1. Makes the input easy - use familiar tool of choice -> WhatsApp/Telegram/etc
2. Integrate with anything - for example gmail through gog
3. Save to memory without prompting
4. Has a Soul.md which you can customize.
5. Have a reason to use a VPS
All of these are possible with Claude Code etc, however it's the the whole package that makes it more useful.