^^^ I think it's all very specific to the individual. The things I personally enjoy doing for "work" (paid employment) and would do in retirement aren't things I could do in a way that I could structure the other non-paid things in my life around. It's a trade off as you said and, for me, it's less about disliking paid employment and more about time-flexibility. Even occasional contracting jobs or WFH have time commitments.
That's my entire point though.
Each person has an individual balance of activities that make up their optimal lifestyle.
But preferring unstructured time has zero relevance to whether or not getting paid to do things is optimal. There are PLENTY of paid activities that are entirely unscheduled. My neighbour is a woodworker who builds artisanal crafts for fun and his buddy who has a stall at the farmer's market sells them and takes a cut.
He makes money filling his day with an activity he loves.
You may not have any unscheduled activities that generate profit, and that makes sense, a lot of people don't. But what I'm pushing back on is the statement that no matter how much someone loves an activity, that the fact that they can make money off of it somehow makes it worse than an activity that makes no money.
That just doesn't gel with what I understand about living ones best life.
Just because a lot of avenues for making money require a schedule doesn't mean they all do. And there's nothing inherently bad with an activity requiring time either. We ALL fill our days with activities, everything we do requires time. Some folks prefer more structure to their activities, some prefer less structure.
I personally prefer less structure than most. But some activities with schedules are so worthwhile that I'll roll with a small amount of time structure. I go see my musician friend perform every single Friday of the summer. Is it always my preferred time to do so? No. But I always go because all of my friends go and a lot of community members turn out. The community connection is worth the scheduling.
That's no different than the scheduling for my job to be worth it.
At a certain point though, if I work too much, it detracts from my flexible time to do other things and my threshold for work going from being net beneficial to net detrimental is *extremely* delicate, hence why I need near total autonomy over how and when I work.
But the job being paid and the music show being unpaid is irrelevant. These are both things I want to do, both things that make my overall life better.
If you had something you loved to do and it made you money, you wouldn't refuse to do it just because it was profitable, that would be insane. If you don't have something like that, then yeah, it makes sense that you don't choose any profitable activities. But that's not a product of you preferring a flexible schedule, that's a product of you not having a flexible activity that makes money in your particular repertoire of activities that you fill your time with.
