Maybe, but I don’t know anyone who’s less happy being retired. They might not be living their retirement fantasy, but the pressure and stress of having to work is gone.
I've known lots of people who spiraled into various levels of depression after retirement. It's even more likely if the retirement wasn't voluntary.
In the no longer useful to employers vein, in the working class town I grew up in there was a common observation that retirement was a harbinger of death. That when someone retired their lifestyle would quickly decline to sedentary decay, boredom medicated with alcohol (or other things). Death would quickly follow.
As an aside, tangentially there's a wonderful passage from Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer -
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
> Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they've either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion.
If your material needs and desires are sufficiently low, and your resources sufficiently high, you could retire. Age or usefulness to an employer could be an upper bound, I suppose.
I look at it like this: finances are like a bathtub. What you spend is the drain, your income (whether salary, interest, cap gains, etc) is the faucet, and your resources are the water in the tub. Retirement is the point where you can turn off (or turn down) the faucet and not run dry. Some people have big drainpipes and need a big tub and lots of water; others can live with a trickle.
For many their work is very core to their identity and without it, they have little to do.
Generally the difference between a consultant and a contractor is kind of diffuse, but basically a consultant has more autonomy and is expected to offer advice and guidance based on their experience, while a contractor is expected more to just implement a plan given to them. But as I said it's very diffuse and many people use the term contractor and consultant interchangeably.
As to what it requires, literally just that you can convince someone to pay you money for you to give them advice. Often a consultant will have a lot of experience in a specific area and will be brought on by companies that need help and expertise in that area for a specific project, but don't want to hire an expert full time.
There are also consulting companies that employ people and hire them out to other companies as consultants. At which point you just get a regular salary from your employer and the company you are hired out to pays your employer for the hours you work.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/cognitive-de...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191029131506.h...
"I used to think I just didn't have the time for all the things I wanted to accomplish; lockdown proved that isn't true!"
Not exactly scientific, but I can relate to that.
I think the idea is that a lot of our wants / desires are urges that come and go, but our dreams and needs are deeper than that and we have to let those urges pass before we can find out what our true desires are.
Perhaps I lack dreams.
I think I will be fine once I retire sometime.