This. High intelligence people often seek other goals, such as the relatively complete freedom of time while having their needs met. You only get so many year

This. High intelligence people often seek other goals, such as the relatively complete freedom of time while having their needs met. You only get so many years... How many of them are you going to spend doing something that you care about rather than some "means to an end" task? To many smart people, real agency is the only currency worth persuing... And you only need a trivially achievable amount of money well spent to achieve relative freedom. So many zero marginal cost things can provide 10-100k a year, and if you are willing to travel, 10k is more than enough to free up 100 percent of your time. Projects you may wish to work on might require additional funding, but for anything worth doing, it is usually easy to find people willing to throw money at it IME. There's more money looking for good ideas than ideas looking for money, especially as interest rates begin to go negative.