That's how I feel at work.
I think my ideal would be to work something like 3 days/week - I could just do that forever if the work was moderately interesting, but there aren't a lot of programming gigs where they let you do that.
When client asks why you can only do 3days/week, "I would love to, but my other clients..."
But you could also charge less too so maybe that’s your advantage
Heck, I know I’d jump on anyone who’d just come over and work when they’re free and take longer, for a lower price, for home improvement type stuff
- Bargain bin stuff that won't pay the bills unless you're completely debt-free living in an extremely LCOL area and situation (this is the stuff I started my career on, while still living with my mom)
- Full time employment redisguised as "freelancing" for tax and/or department budgeting purposes, with expected working hours/availability, expected tools (Slack or Jira or whatever), and basically everything else that would classify the arrangement as employment.
My dream would be 2-3 days a week of client work, and the rest of my time free to live life or work on patron-funded endeavors of my own imagination's creation. Alas, the market demands ruthless efficiency, so even finding 4-day FTE roles (I've now worked two of them, and would hate to go back but see the writing on the wall about it struggling to catch on) is a challenge, let alone part-time stuff.
(Disclaimer: this all comes from a US perspective. I hear in EU, and particularly in NL from some friends, that part time employment as well as part time contracts, are both much more common, but then, workers' experiences in EU almost universally seem to be better than in the US in all categories except pay, so I'm not surprised)
My issue is that I believed in the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". It turned out that doing what I love as a career sucks much of the joy out of what I love.
So there's a part of me that's looking forward to retirement precisely so that I can get back to programming for real, rather than for pay.
But I'm also well aware that this thinking may be yet another trap.