The Hidden Infrastructure of "I Quit My Job to Follow My Passion"
Class Privilege and the Myth of the Self-Made Entrepreneur
The video opens the same way they all do. A guy in a beanie, standing in an artisanal workshop lit by that warm golden hour glow. Vintage machinery in the background. The title: “I Quit My Job in Finance to Make Custom Jeans.”
756,000 views.
I’ve been watching these videos for years now. I’m not immune to their allure. There’s something deeply appealing about walking away from a soul-crushing corporate job to make things with your hands, to pursue something that actually matters to you. I get it. I really do.
However, I’ve started to notice what these videos don’t show.
When Logesh Kumaar, a Malaysian YouTuber with nearly 800,000 subscribers, announced in December 2025 that he was going back to a regular job, he didn’t sugarcoat it. He called it what it was: the financial burden of providing for his family had become too heavy, and full-time content creation wasn’t covering it. He’d tried to make it work, and it didn’t.
This wasn’t some nobody with 500 subscribers. This was a creator with a substantial platform, brand deals, a successful travel and lifestyle channel. And he still couldn’t make it work without going back to traditional employment.
Another creator on Reddit shared a similar story: he went full-time with YouTube and “almost immediately burned out and my video quality, views, and sponsorships plummeted.” He was back at his old job within months. His story won’t show up in your recommendations. You’ll only see the guy in the beanie with the vintage machinery.
That’s survivorship bias at work, the tendency to focus on the people who made it while ignoring the much larger group who tried the same thing and didn’t. The algorithm shows you the winners. The people who attempted the same leap and are now working at Applebee’s don’t get documentary-style videos about their journey. We end up thinking passion-fueled career changes work out more often than they actually do, because the failures are invisible.
The problem isn’t that following your passion is bad. The problem is that it’s presented as universally accessible when it’s actually predicated on class privilege. We frame these stories as being about courage and authenticity, but they’re often really about who can afford to take the risk and who can afford to walk away when it doesn’t pan out. Going back to a day job doesn’t make someone a failure. But the fact that so many people have to go back, while a select few get to stay, tells us something important about what’s really driving these outcomes.
Dr. Erin A. Cech, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, has spent years researching what she calls “the passion principle”, which is the cultural belief that self-expression and fulfillment should be the central factor in career decisions. Her findings are sobering. Over 70% of college-educated workers prioritized passion when making decisions about their career paths, and almost two-thirds ranked it above considerations like salary and job security.
Cech calls this “choicewashing,” the process by which structural inequality gets reframed as individual choice. When someone quits their finance job to make jeans, we’re supposed to read that as a personal values statement, a rejection of empty materialism in favor of authentic work. What we don’t see is the safety net that makes the leap possible.
What does that safety net look like? Cech identifies two key components: “safety nets,” the financial cushion that lets you wait it out until a passion job materializes, and “springboards,” the cultural and social capital that helps you land on your feet. Well-off passion-seekers can volunteer, take unpaid internships, or work below market rate to “get their foot in the door” without worrying about defaulting on student loans or losing their apartment.
There’s also what writer Laura Shear calls “the startup spouse” phenomenon. “Helping manage the stress becomes the de facto role of the startup spouse,” she writes. “For most, it means keeping all the wheels on the bus at home so that life can maintain some semblance of normalcy. For some, it also means supporting the family financially because the entrepreneur isn’t yet drawing a salary.” One startup spouse she interviewed put it bluntly: “No one prepares you for receiving no paycheck for months, donating home furniture to the office, putting everything you own at risk for the company, having no health insurance, or crappy health insurance.” The beanie guy making custom jeans probably has a partner with a steady job and employer-sponsored healthcare. That infrastructure never makes it into the video.
And then there’s the family money.
We love to tell stories about scrappy founders who built empires from nothing. The mythology of the self-made entrepreneur is foundational to how Americans understand success. But the actual data tells a different story.
A 2013 study by UC Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein examined the shared traits of entrepreneurs and found that most were white, male, and had access to higher education. But the real kicker: “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine told Quartz.
An Israeli government study in 2021 confirmed this finding, concluding that “the income of an entrepreneur’s parents was the most important factor towards the likelihood of starting up a business.” Not intelligence. Not grit. Not passion. Parents’ income. The study even found that people who scored lower on math achievement tests but came from wealthy families had better odds of becoming entrepreneurs than high scorers from poorer backgrounds.
Look at the origin stories we celebrate. Jeff Bezos’s parents invested $245,573 in Amazon in 1995. That’s nearly a quarter million dollars in startup capital from mom and dad. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly took a $100,000 loan from his father to start Facebook. Bill Gates’s mother introduced him to executives at IBM, which led directly to the MS-DOS deal that launched Microsoft. Michael Dell’s parents offered seed money for his computer business. Phil Knight credits his parents for helping him start Nike.
None of this is to say these founders didn’t work hard. But talent and hard work exist everywhere. What doesn’t exist everywhere is a family that can write a check for $245,000 when you have an idea. What doesn’t exist everywhere is a mother who golfs with IBM executives. What doesn’t exist everywhere is the ability to try, stumble, and try again without losing your apartment. Having money doesn’t just give you a safety net. It gives you access to the talent, the resources, and the runway that turn an idea into a company.
Elon Musk comes from a wealthy South African background. We could dive into the specifics of his family’s wealth, but the point stands: he didn’t start from nothing. None of them did. The “started in a garage” mythology conveniently omits that the garage was attached to a house their parents owned, and there was money in the bank if things went sideways.
The brutal math of small business survival makes the safety net even more essential. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.5% of businesses fail in year one. By year five, it’s 48.4%. By year ten, 65.1% have closed. The jeans guy who’s still making jeans five years later isn’t proof that passion works. He’s the survivor of a coin flip that most people lose.
Mei Pak, who runs Creative Hive, a resource for handmade business owners, documented a 40-50% drop in handmade sales in 2023. She tells a story about creating a video for her handmade scented food jewelry business that got over a million views on YouTube. The comments? People complaining about the price. “Too many people were complaining about the price!” she writes. “I made this necklace with my bare hands. It was stated that it’s handmade.” Even when the market conditions are brutal, even when consumers don’t value your craft, the people with safety nets can weather it. The people without them can’t.
As one Hacker News commenter put it: “I always get annoyed when entrepreneurs eg. on Shark Tank say things like ‘I quit my job, took out two mortgages on my home, maxed out my credit cards and spent my kids’ college fund on the business. And look at us now, we’re making millions of dollars a year!’” The uncomfortable truth is that most people who follow that advice to the letter end up financially ruined. They just don’t get a public platform to talk about it.
The people who get the public platform are the ones who survived. And their survival is often explained by passion and grit when it should be explained by the safety net that caught them when they fell.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one should pursue their passion. I’m saying that when we present passion-following as a moral imperative, when we treat it as something everyone should do if they just have enough courage, we’re ignoring the structural realities that make it possible for some people and catastrophic for others.
First-generation and working-class graduates who pursue their passion are more likely than their wealthier peers to end up in low-paying, precarious employment far outside their field. And here’s where the narrative becomes something darker than just misleading: Cech found that employers actually prefer passionate applicants specifically because they believe those applicants will work harder without expecting more pay. The passion principle doesn’t just mask privilege. It can be weaponized. Employers benefit from a workforce that believes fulfillment should be its own reward, that asking for fair compensation is somehow crass when you’re doing what you love. “Do what you love” becomes a tool for extracting unpaid labor from people who bought into the dream.
So the next time you see a beautifully shot video about someone who quit their corporate job to make furniture or pottery or artisanal bread, ask yourself: what’s the hidden infrastructure? Who’s keeping the health insurance? What savings did they have from that finance job? How much family money is propping this up? What happens to the people who tried the same thing without those supports?
The guy in the beanie making custom jeans might be genuinely talented. His jeans might be beautiful. His story might be inspiring. But his story isn’t universal. It’s not even typical. It’s the story of someone who could afford to try, who could afford to fail, and who happened to end up on the right side of a coin flip that ruins most people who attempt it.
We don’t get videos about the people who tried and walked away. We don’t get documentaries about the artisan who went back to accounting after two years of bleeding money. We don’t get Instagram reels from the startup founder whose parents couldn’t write a check for $245,000.
Everyone gets help or needs help. Some get it the easy way through privilege: parents with money, a well-paying job that gives them the freedom to pursue their so-called passion knowing full well they could bounce back to their previous career if need be. Others find help through grants, donations, community-oriented assistance. No one does this alone. No one is pulling themselves up from their bootstraps. That’s a myth that really needs to die with the Dodo bird.
Some people genuinely do start from nothing. They exist. But you can’t tell them apart from the trust fund kids by watching the same beautifully lit video with the same warm voiceover about leaving corporate America behind. The algorithm doesn’t label which founders had safety nets and which were actually risking everything. It presents them all as proof that passion and courage are enough.
That’s the lie. Not that passion doesn’t matter, it does. Not that hard work is irrelevant, it isn’t. The lie is that passion and hard work are the whole story. They’re not. For most of the success stories we celebrate, there’s hidden infrastructure holding the whole thing up. And until we start asking about that infrastructure instead of just applauding the courage, we’ll keep telling working-class kids that the only thing standing between them and their dreams is the decision to leap, when really, it’s whether anyone’s there to catch them.