The OP will easily get a tenured job in any tech related branch after a PhD, while just going directly for teaching (as others advised) would result in long term socioeconomic downgrade.

I have a feeling that you haven't worked in academia.

There are no tenured jobs that are easy to get, for the simple reason that firing tenured faculty is intentionally difficult. Tenure-track positions at any reputable university, and even disreputable ones, are highly competitive are require a history of research, in addition to the PhD. Mostly fresh PhDs need to do at least one post-docs in order to be considered for tenure-track. In particular, the offer of a tenure-track position is contingent on the expectation of future research output, which is not consistent with the OP's goal of taking a few months off.

Nor with the fact that OP is approaching retirement age... if you figure 10 years from beginning a PhD program to tenure (which certainly isn't a hard limit, but probably isn't an unreasonable basis to start from) then they might have only 10-15 working years left after 'getting there'. While hiring and tenure considerations would word it _very_ carefully to avoid the appearance of age discrimination, I suspect that would factor into any such decisions.

And if office politics factor into OP's motivations to change, academia has that as bad or worse than any business/corporate setting.

madengr [1] replied to you but I can’t reply to them because their comment is dead.

I just commented to say that it appears madengr has been shadow banned.

I have no idea why they are shadow banned but the comment they left here was reasonable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=madengr