What an interesting term. :) I've thought of that concept on my own, too, but never heard it called that before.
Good article. This particular bit is just heart-breakingly sad:
His mother didn’t bother inviting him to her 50th birthday, because she knew he would be busy. “She was probably right,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been able to get the time off.”
A lot of modern work can be done well in far less than 40 hours a week, but because there's tremendous bureaucratic inertia (coming also from the allegedly smart managers with their fancy MBAs), here we are, with people forced to be on the clock at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, even though realistically they're done with everything much, much sooner.
I hope that rigorous and outdated concept will change someday: maybe the Great Resignation will help, but I don't know that it will.
Personally, I declared lean-FIRE at 34 and walked away from a lot of opportunities. I was quite good at my job - in fact, I only really worked about 10 hours a week. :P If I stayed on for another 5-10 years, I would've become a multimillionaire... At the same time, though, I would've missed out on 5-10 optimal years of enjoying life (I won't stay healthy forever), I would've wrecked my health due to the work stress, and I would've missed out on all the sunsets, or hobbies, or lounging around.
So instead, I walked away from everything, even though my net worth is quite a bit lower than a million. (My frugality gives even the r/leanFIRE community nightmares hahaha) I did that because I can't buy back time, and I'd rather live frugally but get 10 extra healthy years - instead of having more spending money but a lot more stress and 10 less years. For me, this equation makes perfect sense. For people with other value systems, it might not. I just hope that we as a society will be able to have more discourse on this.
And before I forget, try to get your hands on "
The tale of the man too lazy to fail" - it's a short story in Heinlein's novel "Time enough for love." It deals with this exact concept, with the guy who pursued "constructive laziness" as his life mission. :)