I've retired early and gone back to work voluntarily. I find the first 10 to 30 hours per week are good for me, and I genuinely enjoy employing people and working on projects with them. Not every week is exhilarating. Lots of weeks are dogshit and make me feel like going back to 100% life again. But over time, I feel more fulfilled when I try to contribute through work. I will surely reconsider that position when I become the Buddha, but likely not sooner if I keep my health and stay childless.
(do go part-time as soon as you can, it's great)
What you cherish on your death bed is often enabled by plain old hard work. You may not love the work, but for most of it is the path to those happy death bed memories().
Skip the work, and for most of us it will be a short, miserable life scrabbling for food and shelter.
() The big asterisk of course is tech salaries are completely out of whack with effort and complexity. There are a lot of us out here who get enormous salaries for doing comparatively little in the grand scheme of things. These lucky folks are skewing the narrative for the rest of the world.
For me, I will always cherish memories of vacations, my son’s first varsity touch down, my daughter’s vocal solo for a Christmas show, hanging out with friends in the woods with little more than tents, firewood and beer. I will also be quite honest that it’s been enabled by a lot of luck at work and the incredibly high salary I earn in software - which is less than half of the FAANG salaries I see mentioned here.
Life isn’t about living in the now. Or in the tomorrow. Or ignoring the long term, or short term, or whatever term.
Life for most of us is finding balance that works in our situation,
And old age isn’t needed to figure this out. Even middle age will do. When I reflect on my life, I almost never think about past work.
(Yet, I remain mostly working.)