My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.

I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?

Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.

> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus

Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.

That's literally every society