It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.
I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.
Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.
With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.
To my surprise, I haven’t missed it at all. Playing music, reading for pleasure and language studies ( to help with a part time volunteer gig ) have totally met my needs. You never know.
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
It’s up 48% in 15 years, and until the Us-Iran war it was only up 14%
https://fuelwide.com/fuel-prices/netherlands/history
Grocery inflation is 45% over the same period but I suspect you’ll claim CPI figures are nonsense.
Gas for heating has indeed about doubled, unsurprising with both Ukraine and Iran.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
If you have no dependents then yeah do anything even just travel the world and do but of work here and there to keep going.