"Going into business for yourself, becoming an entrepreneur, is the modern-day equivalent of pioneering on the old frontier"
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Calling entrepreneurship the “modern-day equivalent” of frontier pioneering flatters a very current fantasy: that you can outwalk the system with grit, guts, and a good idea. Paula Nelson’s line works because it borrows one of America’s most mythologized stories - the frontier - and repackages it as a business origin story. You don’t just start a company; you “go into business for yourself,” a phrase that frames autonomy as both virtue and destiny. The subtext is clear: employment is domestication, entrepreneurship is open country.
It’s also a quietly ideological comparison. The frontier myth has always been about risk and reinvention, but it’s equally about selective memory: empty land, self-made success, hardship redeemed by ownership. Casting entrepreneurs as pioneers imports that moral glow while sidestepping the less romantic realities of both worlds: the networks, capital, and state power that made settlement possible; the investors, platforms, and regulatory scaffolding that make startups possible. Even the celebrated danger feels curated. The “old frontier” could kill you; the modern one mostly forecloses you, deactivates your account, or leaves you with debt.
As context, it lands neatly in a late-20th/early-21st-century economy that prizes flexibility while offloading security. When stable jobs thin out, “pioneering” becomes a narrative prosthetic for precarity: if you’re struggling, it’s not a structural squeeze, it’s the noble hardship of a trailblazer. The line seduces because it offers dignity, not just opportunity - and because it turns market competition into a national epic.
It’s also a quietly ideological comparison. The frontier myth has always been about risk and reinvention, but it’s equally about selective memory: empty land, self-made success, hardship redeemed by ownership. Casting entrepreneurs as pioneers imports that moral glow while sidestepping the less romantic realities of both worlds: the networks, capital, and state power that made settlement possible; the investors, platforms, and regulatory scaffolding that make startups possible. Even the celebrated danger feels curated. The “old frontier” could kill you; the modern one mostly forecloses you, deactivates your account, or leaves you with debt.
As context, it lands neatly in a late-20th/early-21st-century economy that prizes flexibility while offloading security. When stable jobs thin out, “pioneering” becomes a narrative prosthetic for precarity: if you’re struggling, it’s not a structural squeeze, it’s the noble hardship of a trailblazer. The line seduces because it offers dignity, not just opportunity - and because it turns market competition into a national epic.
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| Topic | Entrepreneur |
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