In your case, it won't. You would be better off renting and investing the extra $2k in assets that are productive rather than speculative. This should be obvious, but the West as a whole has bought into the housing as a form of wealth and can't let the music stop now without ruining millions of lives.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.
Do they tend to work in those jobs? There are people with trust funds working at McKinsey, Google, Harper Collins, Cravath, and Goldman Sachs right now. They all pay well but they aren't places where one has "essentially full control over how much they work, when they work, etc."
You don't need to work to stay rich when you have a $25M trust fund.
There are plenty of people who were born rich who nonetheless go to work everyday. They are engineers, doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, inventors, teachers, professors, and business owners.
Having money doesn't discourage people from working. We won't run into a shortage of astronauts, teachers, or even police officers. But we may find it difficult to find people willing to work as a janitor for $8.00 an hour.
$10k a month is a 'sustainable full-time job' for a senior developer once you factor in health insurance and the additional 7.65% self-employment tax.
I prefer this model for opensource software. We get an awesome product and he gets enough money to sustain himself while maintaining it. Seems like a fair deal for all.
Housing as a form of generational wealth is a trick that works for the population as a whole for a generation or two. The majority of rentals come from regular people who bought long before you and have significantly lower mortgages or no mortgages at all, or large firms who have access to lower rates and more accounting tricks like depreciation. In either case, what they can afford to accept as rents is a lot less than what you can afford to accept as rent. The best you can hope for is significant appreciation or significant rent increases in the face of stagnant wages. High demand markets like NYC and SF can sustain ever increasing prices for a long time, but most markets cannot.