My wife and I quit our SF Bay Area jobs and traveled for a little over 2 years. We backpacked abroad, restored a VW Bus and drove it around the US, and explored the Bahamas on our sailboat.<p>One of my biggest takeaways from our trip - which I think is extremely relevant to the message here - is that my goal will never be to NOT work. Not ever - even in retirement. The consensus strategy of spending 40+ hours of every week of your life saving up so you can enjoy retirement is, to me, a broken model. We met so many people who followed that model only to realize they didn&#x27;t have the health or energy to enjoy all that they had worked a lifetime for. It&#x27;s heartbreaking.<p>Work is a GOOD thing. The preferred solution - and I realize this is a high bar that we&#x27;re beyond fortunate to even consider(more on that at the end) - is to find something you&#x27;re passionate about and you wake up every day wanting to do. Obviously that&#x27;s the old cliche of just doing what you love, but it turns out I&#x27;m one of those dullards who has to learn some of the cliche life-pro-tips through experience to truly understand them.<p>I&#x27;m a solo founder on a business that&#x27;s just entering private beta, so I know first-hand that there&#x27;s an entirely different discussion about delayed gratification and working at an unsustainable pace in the short term to build something meaningful in the long term... and that gets complicated. There&#x27;s no rule of thumb that I know of.<p>I could write a book about this discussion, but in sum: I LOVE codingdave&#x27;s comment, because he used two words that my wife and I ALWAYS use when discussing this: &quot;conscious&quot; and &quot;choices&quot;. These words came up in every discussion we had on our travels when the topic came up. The people we met out there didn&#x27;t get there by accident. They get there because they made choices. They lived below their means. They saved. They learned new skills. They took leaps of faith. VERY few of them were wealthy.<p>When we talk about this, I usually start to say that everything in life is a choice; that we ALWAYS have choices, but the sad reality is that isn&#x27;t true for most people. I won&#x27;t turn this into a political discussion, but will simply say that it would be amazing to live in a world where even the poorest of the poor have palatable choices that they can realistically make. In our current world, those of us who ARE fortunate enough to have some palatable choices can work towards making that a reality. For those that would call that a pipe-dream, there are easily identifiable challenges like affordable childcare that are super-realistic and would go a long way in the right direction. There are amazing organizations already doing great work in that sphere.<p>My business is somewhat tied to this topic. It&#x27;s mentioned in my comment history.<p>PS: A grandfathered unlimited 4g plan and a cradlepoint is GOLD on the road. :)