Like most of your friends, most of my friends will definitely not be broke at 26, they will be mid level investment bankers pulling in 200k per annum. We inevitably judge ourselves with out peers. By doing a startup you feel like your missing out on some years, you are impatient to succeed. Success needs to be now, so you can catch up with your friends.

I guess the solution is to hang around with startup types and realise, happiness is not about money. Its about doing what you love and challenging yourself. I will finish this comment with a fav quote from Michelangelo…

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

@Danny – it’s true that ultimately quality of life doesn’t increase linearly with money.

The problem that I suspect Harj is alluding to is that amongst city grads in London the first difference between £20k and £40k is totally non-linear to the point where you can’t even always afford to spend time with your friends if you’re in the lower bracket.

Surviving amongst those peers in London is *very* different to surviving in SF and can be quite oppressive if you can’t keep up.

On a meta point, it seems a bit disheartening to hear how much people (perhaps unconsciously) assume there’s a direct correlation between salary and quality of life. Sure, if you’re skint then life sucks, but above a certain point of comfort the curve flattens off. On the other hand it is possible to address the quality of life value directly, if you don’t hitch your expectations to the $$$s. (Personally I found this out through laziness – by working around a lack of money I wound up in a situation where I didn’t need so much money to get by, and luckily it turns out life in rural Tuscany can be pretty sweet

In SV going into a start-up is the cool thing to do after uni. In the UK you get the are-you-ok? look if you mention you want to work on a start-up. Perceptions need to change and as you have written, we need a social movement. In Oxford our OE community of active entrepreneurs is trying to do that job.