It seems to me that you're in a place for which you've worked hard in your early adulthood, a place you no longer want. Where you're struggling (based off your

It seems to me that you're in a place for which you've worked hard in your early adulthood, a place you no longer want. Where you're struggling (based off your post and your replies) is that in any direction you look - it's going to take more hard work to get there. Like you're saying: I've worked so hard up till now - surely there's an easier way? I can easily see how your CS PhD, however impressive, doesn't actually confer a lot of practical skills for a different job. It's the nature of PhDs. It'll look good on paper for a quant or FAANG job, but probably doesn't help much beyond, right? And the same kind of applies to quant jobs: the level of maths in interviews is different from the day-to-day drudgery, so not only does it feel like getting a similar-paying job will be pointless, it's also hard. And getting other high-paying tangible skills (like web development) is also hard! To me, the early retirement is a fantasy people paint when they dream of escaping everyday life. What most people dreaming of retirement want is not to be out of productive society, but FREEDOM. They want financial freedom to choose what they do and where. But that's not the same as not having to work. So the metric you're optimizing for - money - is different to the metric you're actually after - freedom. Think of it this way - if you could work from anywhere, would you still mind working as much? If you could also manage you're time so that you meet deadlines but otherwise free to set your day - meditate in the morning, take a walk in the nearby hills - would you still mind working as much? If you're answering No to these questions, early retirement is literally standing in your way of achieving your goals in life. (Just as a note, as all these things are tied up together - even if you had a fully remote job you're assuming you're tied to London as long as your partner works there? Because that's a whole other kettle of fish, which has nothing to do with your job and cannot be fixed by it.)