But here is my take on it: I'd rather be poor and happy than secure any day, and I live my life accordingly.
I take risks, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, on balance it seems to come out roughly even.
Case in point, a bunch of people in Canada wanted to start their own business, a local gas station was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, I put together a package to be able to buy it, invested a whole bunch of money and turned it over to them.
It failed spectacularly, which is a real pity.
But the flip side of that is that I met some guy in a waiting room somewhere, invested some money in to his business, strong armed some other investors into ponying up and he's well into 6 figure territory now and will probably strike it big.
Security is illusionary, who would you rather be dependent on, your boss or your own wits ?
How about all those people that got laid off in the last year, how secure were they before ?
Right now I'm (almost) 45 and I am not scared of doing this, I trust in my own ability to survive and make myself useful to others, directly or indirectly and I expect to pluck the rewards from that.
The satisfaction from doing this under my own power is so much larger than what a paycheck could get me. Any size paycheck.
There is no net though, maybe one day I'll mess up once too many and land on my butt.
But even that doesn't scare me, maybe it should :)