Reading this article and the discussion leave me conflicted. I retired early (40) from a career that most wouldn’t expect that from. I have two pensions and so

Reading this article and the discussion leave me conflicted. I retired early (40) from a career that most wouldn’t expect that from. I have two pensions and some modest investments that allow me to live quite well a couple hours from SF, but would be scraping by there. I can no longer do the career I was successful in due to health degradation from exactly that career, but software was always a part of it so I’m pivoting to that to keep myself engaged and enjoying life. So the comments here on health precluding this idea are very real. I also took about a year to get through the mental ramifications of my entire career being gone, as well as the entire community I was part of (due to moving). I don’t think this is talked about enough, especially in FIRE circles online. Having talked to a few other early retirees you can quite easily find that you no longer fit with the friends you’ve had for years, either due to interests diverging, spending abilities diverging, or plain old jealousy from some of them. At the end I elected to pursue more education and (somehow) managed to get into a solid graduate program. So I do think staying active in retirement is something you should plan, and this is even more true for early retirement. The type of partial work that I see talked about here is possible, but not generally at the earnings potential of your primary career. Things like being a substitute teacher, poll worker, etc. all pay and in California you can make around $15k/year fairly trivially doing that. If you want to donate plasma that’s another $5k/year or so; I haven’t done it but know a few early retirees that do for health reasons (reduction of forever chemicals). The key to those jobs is that they won’t elevate your stress level like trying to find a salaried job or gig work will. That’s a quick set of thoughts from someone who actually did execute on this type of life path and is living it in close proximity to SF, and without any type of software career.