I think plenty of people work hard to hit retirement money, and then make mid-life career switches to jobs with better work-life balance. My wife and I were ha

I think plenty of people work hard to hit retirement money, and then make mid-life career switches to jobs with better work-life balance. My wife and I were having lots of trouble starting a family and were preparing to basically retire early. The problem is, it's difficult to fit in socially if you're retired early. I was about to start working in earnest on a career pivot to consulting/gig work that I could do for a few months out of the year and travel with my wife the rest of the year. The main aim of the flexible work was to remain employable and able to ramp back up if something went terribly wrong with our retirement investments and/or our living costs. Luckily, our 4th pregnancy worked out (unlike the previous 3). Now, we're working to maximize opportunities for our son, but we were preparing to make serious career changes to trade the majority of our income for much more flexibility. Now, the plan is to keep working until our son is through college, but he's less than 2 years old, so there's plenty of time for plans to change. Had we lost our son, the plan was to live out a 3-4 star lifestyle, traveling the world and working just enough to keep the option open for ramping work back up in an emergency. So, it's a sample size of one, but I think the type of people who live well enough below their means to retire early also tend to be the the type of people who dial their careers back to idle for a "soft retirement" instead of quitting work cold-turkey.