As I've often said, despite all the talk about early retirement, many of us - from MMM on down - have not given up working. We've just found ways to remove a lot of the 9-5 regimentation & other unpleasantnesses from the process.
I mentioned this in
another thread, but it seems to me there is a continuum that looks kind of like this:
<- Pure Hobby ---- + ---- Full-time work for The Man ->
And furthermore, that one's pay is generally proportional to where you fall on that continuum.
If you have a big paper money stache (investment portfolio), big enough that you consider yourself FI, you can pick any spot on that continuum where you are most happy. The real "power" is being able to find something that
feels like a hobby but also brings in some income. If your expenses are low enough, it may be pretty easy to cover them with a "hobby job", and leave your investments untouched (and presumably growing).
Err... And that's not work? Could you explain why not? Or how you writing book & blog is all that different from me writing 3D seismic tomography code that runs on GPUs? (Which is one of the main things I've been doing the last few months.) I set my own hours, and take off to hike, bike, ski, or ride whenever I feel the urge (and the weather cooperates).
Side question: is "writing 3D seismic tomography code that runs on GPUs" something that one can get into with
general programming experience, but without
specific experience in that particular domain?
I think it's just a matter of how a job
feels to the individual, as to whether or not it's a "job" in the traditional sense, as in "9 to 5 until 65"; or whether it's a "hobby job", where you do something for the fun of it, and earning income is a nice perk, rather than a requirement.
I find that there are things I enjoy doing intrinsically (i.e. hobbies), but in at least one case have tried to do it extrinsically (i.e. for pay) and found the luster is quickly lost. I.e., for me, some things are only fun as a hobby, and more or less suck as a job. And I think that's the caveat that a lot of "follow your passions" advice overlooks.