If your number is on the order of $10 million, I suspect that no, you wouldn't, because you haven't thought hard enough about retirement and how to achieve and keep it with a satisfying lifestyle to realize that you don't need nearly so much (or at least most people, maybe you have a need for very fancy things, I won't judge). And requiring $50 million at a younger age? What's the logic in that? The younger you are the lower you can set your number, because if you end up being wrong either about the feasibility or about your mental state from not having a job, you still have time to fix things or even pivot to a new career. (You also get more years of compound interest.) I quit my BigCo job 5 years ago just before my 30th birthday with ~$500k across VFIAX and VGT, I've been "retired" since and that amount has grown considerably. I'm still quite happy not working for someone, while still being reasonably confident I could get a programming job again if a need arose, and there's always the possibility of going a bit crazy and burning through it all to self-fund hiring some employees of my own to make a go at a business.

It's not hard for me to understand why people keep working even if I don't want to be that way. There are so many reasons. Some people just really like having a job, or think of it as a moral duty (and themselves as doing good by fulfilling that obligation), or some get their self-worth from having a job, or some like being occupied by work when they know that without it they'd just rot, or many of them actually like their work a lot more than they dislike it and pay above some threshold is just "nice". If you're particularly good at your job, too, there's a lot of joy in doing things you're good at, no matter what kind of job it is. Some have expensive tastes or have made expensive compromises or have fallen on expensive bad luck that all can need ongoing funding. Some want to make or support things and need capital to do so. Some just see life as a game, and money going up is their source of happiness and sign of winning. There's all sorts of minds and preferences in this world.

This is merely your failure to imagine it. Maybe they enjoy it, maybe they have a specific goal they want to achieve, have some sort of obsession, maybe they feel duty to all the people they lead and relie on them, think they are making the world better so they feel compelled to continue working, are mad with power and enjoy lording over other people. There are many many reasons why one would work after being financially secure, and they're all equally valid as a personal motivator.

And, anyways, I think you say this now, but if you were to get those 10 millions you would probably change your tune. A lot of people would find some other project to dedicate their energy. Especially the kind of people that make stuff happen.

It can also be as simple as finding meaning in the habit of work and the growth which may come with it. Nihilism and hedonism wear thin after a short while.

> sort of obsession

That doesn't sound very positive to me. Perhaps OP has a point

I am one of the person who, if they got 40 mil USD tomorrow, would just work much harder on stuff I like to work on (which is making open source software sustainable in robotics), because I would have to spend less time have to take care about the economics of daily life. I could get a chef to cook me personalized healthy meals. I could have a mini-gym at home (which is not that expensive to be honest).

but I could get a home near a major airport like 10 mins from SFO, and so with working out and eating consuming 4 hours and sleeping 6 hours a day and 2 hour of spouse time. I legit have 12 hours a day to work everyday. I could easily do that in a sustainable manner 6 days a week, and spending Sunday relaxing by helping out in my parent's farm and then relaxing in the evening before going back to work next week.

Seems like an ideal life for me. The only difference from today is the extra 3 hours I spend in traffic and an average 1 hour daily in running errands. And extra work on Saturday like fetching groceries, looking after my home, fixing stuff etc.

If I get money, I could save that 4 hour of my life and dedicate it to working on something I really like.

> I could get a home near a major airport like 10 mins from SFO

You need a lot less than 40m$ to get a house 10 minutes from SFO, Daly City or outer neighborhoods in SF have homes for less than a million for sale right now

This is crazy to me. I almost think it’s rage bait but will give you the benefit of the doubt. The lifestyle you describe leaves no room for friends, relationships, or hobbies. Working 72 hours a week is not sustainable for anyone over the long term unless they truly have no interest in any of the three things I listed. That may be the case for you, but that’s exceedingly uncommon.

It's one out of a sea of options. Of course, not all are good and healthy. But some are.

once someone is on top, they almost never give it up. how often does the king abdicate without being so ill he can’t continue?

Don’t apply the morality of a worker to a top capitalist

Work life is quite a lot different for a working-stiff than it is for a CEO. In large part, their company is an extension of themselves. Work whatever hours you want to. Private plane to take you wherever you want to go for free, if you can come up with a work-related excuse to go there (with no need to justify not coming back for weeks). Multiple folks acting more-or-less as your personal assistants. An office bigger than your house, filled with anything you want in it, on the company's dime. A big pool of cash you can order the company to throw at whatever interests you. etc.

Based on this description, you could say that what the CEO does in no way resembles what real work looks like for 90% of the population. Which I think is true. It's a pity they make so much more than people who do actual work.

> you could say that what the CEO does in no way resembles what real work looks like for 90% of the population

I’d wager you can say this about most jobs. The anomaly is butt-in-seats office jobs.

I doubt he cares that much about the company paying for things. Once you hit 10B+, all of that stuff is just noise.

In my experience of CEO's they actually do care deeply about not paying for anything if the company can pay.

When you are the boss work is a lot less unpleasant than when you are an employee. When you are at the highest level in the organization and also the major shareholder, you can shape your work environment and and workday in a way that you like it.

He worked for 60 years because he liked doing it, and as he became more successful, the job just getting more pleasant for him.

I cannot speak for him but from reading his annual reports and various writings and listening to the occasional interview, it seems that he enjoyed working much more than anything he would do while being retired.

You can call this great american work ethic, and that is part of it, but the other part of it is that when you are the boss you can kind of remove most unpleasant parts of your job and leave only the parts that are the most fun and interesting for you.

He sat around talking to people, reading, betting on stocks/financial markets, playing games and occasionally buying a business.... that is many people's dream retirement.

Really? My dream retirement will be to be on a beach surfing while I drink caipirinha.

The commonality is that you both enjoy doing what you love, rather than the actual realization of that which is obviously far different.

Can you imagine reading and researching the world on your retirement? Because that's what people like him do, except they mainly focus on 10-K statements. Those are genuinely interesting to read once you learn to skip boilerplate and go for the content.

He also seems to talk to a lot of people, and he has access to pretty much anyone given his stature. Imagine being passionate about business and then being able to spend every day talking to people about their businesses and their thoughts on business. I'm surprised he retired at all!

Their work is their enjoyment. Buffett would've been investing even in "retirement," so to him, work and retirement are functionally the same.

This.

The work/retirement dichotomy is such a weird and peculiar artifact of the 1950s US middle-class nuclear-family milieu.

That's gone.

For the rest of us, it's just...live your life, until you don't.

(viz. Below the fold: "Buffett remains as chair...")

Peculiar artifact? Are you forgetting all the people who retired from mining coal, building cars, or running plumbing? It's not weird that seventy year olds would prefer to stop doing those things. I don't know that many people who would claim blasting ore underground is their enjoyment.

Why are you arguing a strawman? No one brought up coal miners, not sure what that has to do with the 1950s anyway in specific.

Can you imagine a singer who will continue singing even after getting 50 million ?

To some people, their careers are interesting in and of itself, beyond money.

This applies to many professions: scientists, CEOs, writers, painters.

I would probably be Software Engineering even if my employer didn't pay me to. As evidence, note that it's new year's eve and I'm writing patches (and waiting for tests) during my holidays for someone else's FOSS project I'm contributing to :).

I my employer didn't pay me, I'd stop working on their projects. But in the meantime, I enjoy my profession (at least most of the time) and get paid. If I had enough money then I'd stop working on what my management wants and work on stuff that I want to work on. And I have to imagine that at this point, Buffet is also doing whatever he wants to.

This is how I am.

I can design and build anything. If I didn't have to do it for work, I'd be making my own evil projects.

You can't take the country out of this boy it turns out...

According to him he was doing what he liked.

I'm at that point now, debating when I'll retire. We only live once and I'm not sure if I should continue working. I've reached financial freedom at a pretty young age. It's a daily debate in my mind when to call it quits, but I've never not worked and it's difficult to make the change. What I'm missing in life is time and that's what work takes from me and is the driving force behind my desire to retire -- time to do other things in life.

If you don’t have family or kids do not stop working.

I have a wife and two kids. That's one reason I still work (it's probably not a good example for the kids to see a father not working)

More broadly, I'd say if you don't have something to retire to (kids or otherwise), don't.

Yup, that’s how you end up dead very quickly.

And if you do have kids, the most profitable thing for your wife to do upon learning you won't be working any longer would be to divorce you, take 50%, impute your income for child support calculation at what you were earning before (so every 5 years you owe your full pre-tax salary). That way their quality of life won't be impacted nearly as much.

So likely at least 8x your pre-tax salary (like 11 or 12x post tax) is gone right off the bat as soon as you retire. So if you are retiring before age 40 basically all of your wealth will vaporize as soon as the mother of your children realizes they can basically take the entire wealth through a mixture of divorce, child support, and alimony and they must act fast before the imputed income calculation drops.

You could stop working and lie for 5 years claiming you are employed and doing work stuff. Then the risk of this is over. But you should definitely have a prenup or a postnup if this isn’t possible.

I totally get it. You need a purpose to be happy. If you enjoy your work and get a sense of fulfillment from it, why should you stop?

As a retired person I’ve always been curious about this. I questioned a friend who is multiple FU money rich. He said he just love his job, and he’s in a position to work the way he wants to work.

Not my cup of tea (and Die with Zero book explains the common sense on this) but I get why though. There is tons of status attached to it, lots of people don’t know what to do with themselves, a lot of identity ( especially in US) attached to the work.

He's just wired differently. He spent his spare time reading financial statements.

You could argue he was retired and just continuing his hobby.

> I will never undertand this people that live all their life working, when they clearly have the chance to retire much sooner.

Some people just love what they do. In addition to people loving what they do, there are also people who don't like to do nothing: travelling, reading, sipping pina coladas in the pool in Florida, painting, playing videogames all day long etc. is not for everyone.

And there are even people who fit both: they love what they do and they have moreover absolutely no interest in retiring and "doing nothing".

EDIT: also some people are action junkies that must be working. A friend of mine is working a full-time regular job and is also a voluntary firefighter, responding to emergencies during week-ends etc. He doesn't do it for the little additional money it brings: he does it because he loves to be helpful.

Warren Buffett also retried at a younger age. In a 1969 letter to partners he wrote, “I intend to give all limited partners the required formal notice of my intention to retire”. But life had other plans…

I get you, but maybe you wouldn't be able to retire.

It was that quest for more that made them even get to that 10 or 50 million you talk about.

If they didn't have that personality for more, they likely would have stopped way sooner.

I agree with you. There are so many more worthwhile things to do than investing. I would also retire immediately with that kind of money and focus on creating real value in the world

That's a very selfish take.

For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money and then give it away to good causes, that is going to be the best choice v trying to add value in the world to make themselves feel better.

That is some logic twisting there.

> For folks with the ability to make truckloads of money

Make it? Like actually invent and build stuff? Or just harvest money from others because you have the capital?

It's not logic twisting, it's just acknowledging the difference between doing good and feeling good.

As for "harvesting" - call it what you want - he is taking a truckload of money out of the financial system and giving it to worthy causes.

You don't need retirement-level money to create "real value in the world"...

allocating capital well provides significant value to the world. His style of investing specifically meant not pouring money into hype stocks and instead investing in companies that have sustainable business models.

Have you ever considered that some people enjoy investing?

Imagine if I said "there are so many more worthwhile things to do than painting" if some famous artist retired.

For a lucky few of us, our job is something we might do unpaid if we had our needs addressed already. It's fun!

I like travel, I like relaxing at home. But I don't know if it's what I'd want to do all the time. I like having some pull, driving me towards a greater goal.

“Everything must end; meanwhile we must amuse ourselves.”

— Voltaire

When what you do depends on having power and you are above a certain level it's either up or down and out.

Retiring simply means doing something else. For him, whatever that was must have been less fun.

I get the sense that he arranged things so that he didn't have to work all that hard, he didn't do any short-term trading requiring constant attention and his work was done at his portfolio companies as soon as they had management he trusted.

It provides purpose. Many people who retire early after doing all the random stuff they thought would be cool would likely find themselves isolated and decaying without purpose.

I took a sabbatical last year. Ran out of cool and exciting stuff real quick.

I personally realized that I got bored of solo sized projects. It’s a lot more fun working with other really smart, motivated people.

I like to say if I could retire today; I would do the same thing I do now, just without a boss telling me to do it. I love what I do.

If you are really enjoying your life, why would you change it to something that you wouldn't enjoy?

We all die on the same order of magnitude.

We all have pleasure and suffering along the same couple of orders of magnitude.

In geological timespans, none of the fun you had will matter. Even a year from now, your memories are just wistful nostalgia (perhaps a psychological detriment!) And that's if your brain architecture is even set up to recall senses and events well (not everyone can).

My view is that the intellectual pursuit is more fulfilling than a world simulating traversal of novel experiences. Those neurons will turn to dust soon anyway, and it'll be like it never even happened. Why spend so much time fretting over it?

Spend time with family, but trying to rack up on restaurants and things and places and visits - meh, it's just simulation and squirts of neurotransmitters. Ephemeral. They leave no trace. It all fades to emptiness.

I'm not saying be completely stoic. But don't overdose on pleasure and thrill and novelty. Over indexing that way cuts down on impact.

Building never stops, even when you do. Laying a foundation shapes human behavior at scale. Leads to more shoulders being stood upon. Higher order effects.

Every single person I admire made an impact.

I'm not my genes that I was built from or the genes that I might pass down. I'm the ideas and deeds of a short life that hopefully left lasting impact and caused second order effects.

Hacker news moment. If you believe this, you are lost, but man. What a terrible take.

Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.

Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.

Not the GP but I don’t think they were talking about “building something to make some guy richer” - they was were talking about building a life and relationships that positively impact the people they care about.

HN seems allergic to discussing the reality of power dynamics IME.

Being in charge of Berkshire hathaway is a very powerful and respected, revered, envied, coveted, admired. Retired is just retired. As folksy as he presented I suspect Buffet very much enjoyed weilding that power which he could not likely ever get elsewhere.

Charlie’s will explains their mindset:

https://youtu.be/FvRT15EayG0

What would you do though? My brain needs problems to solve. Maybe I'd just grow my own food. But if I didn't like that and just bought food I'd get bored very quickly.

He did exactly what he wanted to do. That's all you need to know. To each their own.

What does retiring even means when

- you enjoy it AND

- you do not have a "boss" telling you what to do AND

- it makes you more "popular" because the World you live in associate a higher number with your "value" in society

Why would you even stop? It's not about having enough to survive.

It wasn't really work for him I think. He enjoyed the vast majority of what he did. Not all of us get to be so lucky. Does an artist or writer retire if they love their art?