Well, I thought this was pretty terrific, and I'm a little sad to see some of the comments.<p>I don't think it's a "very expensive mid-life retirement", to echo and paraphrase much of the criticism here. Yes, it could be, but it also doesn't need to be. Instead, it's about a mindset which says - I'm ok with going this far but don't feel the need to go a huge lot further.<p>We spent the weekend with friends. She is high up working for some US corp, doing maybe £250k a year. He's in something to do with governance that I don't fully understand, on maybe £150k+. They live in a stunning house, they have insanely busy jet-setting type lives, they have two small kids, two expensive cars, endless holidays abroad, several flats that they rent out, all the trimmings.<p>We had fun seeing them, and dipping into their life - but on the whole they seem to spend their lives being stressed, busy and not very contented.<p>My wife and I spent the journey home thanking our stars for our much simpler, much less glamorous, much (financially) poorer lives. We live by the sea, we have raised our (now late teen / early twenties) kids by choosing to be present, and this has come at the "expense" of our careers. We've run a small business working with non-profits for 15 years where we deliberately (in order to keep a sense of life balance) choose not to grow. My wife started a floristry business because she wanted something beautiful that was hers, but she has no ambitions to make it into something enormous and unwieldy.<p>We're in our late 40's / 50's - so I guess we partially fit the criticism, although we're far from retirement (lolz, not nearly enough cash to do that!), but on the other hand - we've <i>always</i> chosen to live like this. We had brief flirtations with big jobs in our mid-20's, and we had some hunger to climb a little bit up the salary pole early on, but we've both always been in and around non-profits and we've never had ambitions to be hugely wealthy or hugely successful, or hugely anything really. We just like ticking along, doing what we do, seeing some friends, writing a few songs and looking at bits of art along the way.<p>I do fully accept that there is a whole level of shitness in environments in which you have to hold down 3 jobs in order to make ends meet, and I also feel that the current environment is pretty scary for kids just entering the job market or at the beginning of their working lives. I'm under no illusions: I've been pretty lucky in my personal and working life. But I've also made this journey making quite a lot of conscious decisions that I think can be chosen (if you want to choose them!) along the way, not just when you're older or luckier or more comfortable.<p>You can sometimes choose (for example) to buy second hand, or to try not to take on debt, or to go for jobs that give you a better balance of time vs money. You can choose to do things cheaper. You can choose to be happier with less. You can choose experiences over objects.<p>Having no money is awful. But having a massive ton of it with all the complexity it brings - that can be awful, too.