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I've been following this community for a while, and in fact I attended the first Startup School conference -- and was almost certainly the only person to have arrived from the midwest via Greyhound bus. (I pestered a couple of very nice SFP alums about what they would do if they lived in a small town and had no co-founder ... I know, I know).
Startup School changed my life in an unexpected way: it finally clicked that I could change my location to make my life better.
This did not result in me moving to Silicon Valley.
Instead, for the next 7 years, I spent 9 months of each year in remote Pacific South America, doing volunteer work with friends - and surfing, quite a lot during the good season. Sometimes I'd return and do about 3-4 months of contract programming on-site with great teams, mostly in Ruby/JRuby and early Node.js in those years.
These days I work mostly remotely; I still have a home base down south, and I travel a lot with my better half. (I write mostly multi-user systems in BEAM languages since 2015, but I often do smaller projects in Swift, TS, Kotlin etc, usually with someone in my network or someone they've vouched for).
Like pg says, lots of good projects, to really do them right, have to be companies. For that reason I can't completely rule out doing a startup. But it'd have a lot to compete with, so it's not inevitable.