No doubt it depends quite a lot. Too often people see &quot;retirement&quot; as &quot;waiting to die&quot; which is not a fair characterization.<p>People have asked me why I&#x27;m still working for other people, rather than pursuing my own interests. I ask myself that, and when I believe I&#x27;ll be happier doing that, I&#x27;ll take that path. But for now the kinds of things I like to play with (like large distributed systems with a tremendous scale) I can&#x27;t really afford to host something like that in my home laboratory. I could perhaps put a couple of thousand Rasberry Pi equivalent systems in custom racks of some sort, but the overhead of that is so much easier when its someone else&#x27;s job. Using AWS for experiments is fun but can be expensive for even short periods. So working at a company where they already need that level scale, and are willing to give me enough freedom to play with it (and even hire people to play with it with me ;-) it makes more sense for me to work for them.<p>That said a long time friend of mine retired from Cisco and now pursues the things he is interested in full time. He&#x27;s a lot happier <i>not</i> being at work. For him the other choice made more sense.