Haha, ok, so updates.
A couple of weeks after that post gerardc quoted, I had my final straw moment and turned in my resignation. (It has a good FU story with it that I may eventually post on the appropriate thread, but not right now.) I gave four months notice, meaning that I left Well Paying But Super Stressful Job at the end of the year (now a little over three weeks ago). At that time, I had saved about $525k.
My bare minimum FIRE number was $625k, which is 25x a spending level of $25k/year. However, I have a few other "luxury" expenses, including paying for my niece's and nephew's college funds, wanting to travel more, and self-insuring for LTC. Therefore, I budgeted to have 25x $30k/year, which is $750k, as my "full FI" number, plus an additional $50k for LTC self-insurance, bringing my grand padded total to $800k. So yes, it is indeed about $150k (actually $175k) more, an amount which would have taken me just over one additional year of working at my prior job to have saved. However, in addition, these amounts were in 2015 dollars, and I am assuming a 3.5% inflation rate, which means that as of the end of last year (2016), I'd actually have needed $828k, and as of the end of this year, I'd need about $857k.
I'm now almost a month into a six month sabbatical, after which I will begin working PT and doing a paid internship to train for a possible new semi-retirement career. The pay is high enough to cover my expenses, but obviously nowhere close to what I was making before. However, even with the drastically decreased income (this year, I expect to earn about 1/4 of what I earned last year), I am only delaying reaching my full, padded FI by about 2 years (so will likely get there in 2020 now). And I still expect to reach bare minimum FI early next year or possibly even by the end of this year.
Regarding your concerns about whether your life will change drastically after FI, in my case, I am relatively confident that mine won't. I am already middle aged (early 40s), unmarried, with no plans to have my own children, and have a pretty good idea of what I'd like to be doing with my time. I readily concede that I might feel differently if I were still in my 30s or especially in my 20s though, so gerardc's points are well taken and well worth considering, especially for younger retirees.
Hopefully this clarifies for those who are interested.