> If you are in the top 5% of earners, you have the ability to save enough money so you can switch to whatever level of employment you want.

I’m skeptical. My peers and I are in the top 1% of earners. We cannot save enough money to just opt out of our 1% incomes. Real estate is too expensive. (Bay Area)

I suspect many people in the top 5% are wage slaves as much as anyone else and have very little available in terms of viable options to continue the same lifestyle.

I’m in the top 1% but I still live in a 400sqft inlaw unit. Real estate is very expensive where you get those high incomes.

I suspect many people in the top 5% of earners aren’t my age though (30) and have generational wealth going on if not wealth from buying their home a long time ago when things were cheaper.

That was exactly my motivation of asking this question. If you have a substantial disposable income available year-on-year, you have the option to decide whether to just pay-off your mortgage and then work in something of high personal value, but potentially with lower pay closer to the median. This will still leave you with considerable disposable income compared to your median-income peers at that point.

Alternatively, so I thought, high earners could continue to optimize for high pay to afford more luxuries.

My expectation was then that a considerable amount of high-earners would choose to trade income with work they value personally. Triggering social mobility by allowing someone else to take their place.

Reading these threads, I am thinking now that maybe this is not so much relevant. If it is true, as others have suggested, that high-earners have more chances to get into positions that are well paid almost by default, than the choice for high earners is not between high income or valuable work. They can do both, because even when they start working for an NGO or take government position, their income would be expected to be high.