I'm from the Midwest and that was the response I got from a lot of people when I first started my own business.
More interesting is who really supported me at the start - I'm from the upper middle class and people always expected me to go off to work at some big company after college. Most of the other upper middle class people treated me with this sympathetic (and, I think, condescending) type of tone when I was starting out. But most of my best friends are actually from a lower income group (you'd say blue collar or skilled labor), and they and their families really encouraged me and understood I was being ambitious and doing this of my own volition.
Of course, now that my partner and I have 3 employees working for us and are profitable, I don't get much sympathy from anyone any more :)
I could see that making sense. Someone making, say, $60k or less a year could very well see starting a business as the only realistic way to greater income and autonomy. To someone making more it could look like a risky venture that jeopardizes a decent income. Middle class apathy...
But it may be more of a class/culture thing, Paul Graham talked about how people like Ford and the other industrialists came from the working class, rather than the middle class because starting their own business was considered too much a risk when you could get a secure job with a really good salary for the rest of your life working at a big corporation.
Or maybe it is just because until fairly recently the price to start a company that would need the skills you would have to pay a salary that would put your employees in the middle class for would cost several million dollars and as a consequence would be rather rare, whereas most of the blue collar workers could imagine starting their own plumbing company, because that isn't such an unusual thing to do.
As an aside, getting into the trades would be a great way to make a lot of money without having to pay of college debt, the work can't be outsourced and since everybody knows you are supposed to go to college, getting into the trades is undervalued.
More interesting is who really supported me at the start - I'm from the upper middle class and people always expected me to go off to work at some big company after college. Most of the other upper middle class people treated me with this sympathetic (and, I think, condescending) type of tone when I was starting out. But most of my best friends are actually from a lower income group (you'd say blue collar or skilled labor), and they and their families really encouraged me and understood I was being ambitious and doing this of my own volition.
Of course, now that my partner and I have 3 employees working for us and are profitable, I don't get much sympathy from anyone any more :)