If he retired.. then what? I'm also going to retire, but in the interim I experience no stress, have plenty of free time, and enjoy what I do.
If his businesses fail he has no other options, if I lose my job I go find another one doing the same thing, making the same amount of money.
Is this really that hard to believe?
You started by making the point that he might have more money, but you have more time, which you conclude is ultimately more valuable.
As many have pointed out, he can sell his business and retire, which you don’t have the option to do. Your rejoinder that he can’t do that because then he’d have too much time makes little sense, both because you’ve already setup the axiom that “more time = more freedom”, but also because he could at that point decide to do all kinds of things: start another business, buy one, get a job, work for charity, whatever. He’s quite obviously more free than you, although perhaps not psychologically, who can say.
You don’t need to defend your life choices to anyone, but from the outside it looks like you’re making an illogical case because you can’t accept that he actually does have more freedom than you. Which is OK! There’s always someone out there doing better than us.
As I'm trying to re-iterate, work-life balance. Others in this thread are making the assumption that work is always bad. People like working, without work we have no purpose. But finding work that offers work life balance offers both - purpose and leisure time. Not an excess of one or the other,
When we have an excess of work and money we have no leisure time, when we have an excess of leisure time we have no purpose. This isn't that controversial of a point, read up on any number of uber-wealthy people that attempted to retire early.
Sure they were financially free, but in practice they were beholden to the work they chose.
And lots of people have retired early. Many struggle with it and return to work to find purpose or meaning. But they can choose to do that, and on their own terms. I’ve never heard anyone who has become financially independent wish they were back where they had to work a job in order to survive.
And guess what, if they DID want that, they could choose that too! They could donate their money and go back to work.
They’re more free than you are, no matter how you slice it. It’s OK to acknowledge that.
Can they choose anywhere on the work / life continuum? Maybe sometimes. Can they just go do something else? It's not always that simple.
For the record, I am currently self-employed again after a five-year stint in big tech. Prior to that I worked for myself for more than a decade. I’ve seen this issue from both sides, and I definitely wouldn’t say most entrepreneurs can pick anywhere on the work/life balance continuum. But again, we’re not talking about most entrepreneurs, or even really about entrepreneurs at all. We’re talking about people who have reached financial independence, specifically your relative. All of this would still be true if they were an employee who had enough money to stop working tomorrow.