Originally published on Cuéntamo’s Substack (in Spanish).
This morning I read one of those articles that make you want to shut the laptop and go outside for some air. A successful entrepreneur (or so it read) looking down on the rest of the world. The people who hold down a job, clock in and out, and don’t dream of reinventing any industry, he didn’t call them anything ugly, of course. He didn’t need to: you could read it between the lines. That their life, the life of the majority, is a vulgar life. And my blood boiled a little. A little for them and, as I’ll get to, a little for me.
Let me start with the first part. “Vulgar” is one of those words we’ve all managed to dirty. Today we use it to mean crude, low-class, almost tacky. But “vulgar” comes from the Latin vulgus, which is nothing other than the common people. Ordinary folk. The majority. Vulgar is, literally, what almost everyone does and wants. So when someone tells you, eyebrow raised, that your life is vulgar, without realizing it they’re handing you an enormous truth: that your life looks like almost everyone else’s.
And there’s something more, which is what really gets to me. Those “vulgar” people are precisely the ones who make the genius’s project possible. The entrepreneur has his idea, fine. And who builds it? Who writes the code, who serves the customers, who packs the boxes, who keeps the books, who gets up early so the machine keeps turning? They do. The ones on the payroll. No visionary ever raised anything on his own from the stage of a talk. Behind every founder looking down his nose there are a hundred “vulgar” people without whom his dream wouldn’t get past a PowerPoint. Biting the hand that builds your empire takes some nerve.
Because let’s look at what that oh-so-vulgar life is actually about. You study. You earn a degree or learn a trade. You find a job and you put your back into it, one year and another and another, putting up with bad Mondays and the odd worse boss. You start a family, if you feel like it, and you raise it (which is anything but comfortable). You pay off the mortgage little by little. You retire. And, with luck and many years in between, you die at peace, surrounded by your people. Put like that, cold, it even sounds like not much. But look closely: there’s nothing small in there. There’s more merit in doing an ordinary job well for thirty years than in almost any funding round.
“But they don’t take risks,” the guru will say. “They don’t leave their comfort zone.” Well, no. They don’t want to. So what? Since when is not wanting to gamble your family’s income a character flaw? We’ve turned risk into a virtue in itself, as if taking risks were good just for the sake of it. And it isn’t: risk is fine when you choose it and you know what you’re putting on the line. But preferring solid ground, having a floor under your feet for your loved ones, isn’t cowardice. It’s almost always plain common sense.
And mind you, what drives me up the wall isn’t that this fellow loves his founder’s life. Far from it: building a company is great. Genuinely great, with its freedom, its vertigo and the lovely headache of building something of your own. What drives me up the wall is the ladder. That we’ve put entrepreneurship right at the top, at the peak of a moral scale, and everyone else at the bottom, apologizing for not wanting to climb. Because not everyone wants to climb that ladder. And, above all: THEY DON’T HAVE TO. There are people whose ambition is to change the world (bless them), and people whose ambition, every bit as legitimate, is to have a good life: the kids growing up healthy, the work done, Sundays sacred. It’s not less ambition. It’s a different one.
And now I’ll tell you why my blood was boiling for me too. For the record, I’m in no position to lecture: I make my living as a freelancer, billing mostly companies abroad, and on top of that, at night and on weekends, I build things of my own (one of them is what you’re reading, Cuéntamo). Of the quiet, nine-to-five life I have rather little. And maybe that’s why I see it so clearly: the “vulgar” life, the one of the person who clocks in and collects a paycheck at the end of the month, doesn’t need anyone to rescue it from itself. It needs something far less epic. To reach the end of the month with room to spare. To know how much money they’ll have six months from now. To be able to save for what matters without juggling or lying awake doing sums. Peace of mind, basically.
And that’s what I build Cuéntamo for. Not so anyone gets rich or quits their job recklessly, but so that whoever doesn’t want to roll the dice has their numbers clear and sleeps through the night. And here’s the funny part: it works just the same in all three places. For the salaried person who wants their pay to stretch and buy them some peace. For the freelancer who bills and wrestles with taxes and the safety cushion (yours truly). And even for the entrepreneur looking down his nose, who also needs to know how much is left in the bank and how much he’ll have next month, maybe more than anyone. Clear numbers, out in the open, don’t care about ladders.
So yes: I stand up for the vulgar. And I count myself in. Let everyone else fret over the ladder. Me, living with one foot on each side, some days I look at the ones on the quiet side and envy them to death.
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