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I would also consider just choosing the middle ground and take the pension, retire half time. If that’s doable within your country’s framework.

Less work, and you can potentially choose the work depending on how you do this, which can make it even more enjoyable in addition to having less hours. You’ll get to supplement the pension with a bit of income, you can perhaps even choose to live more frugally for a few years to get some extra investments going that you only touch on emergencies, but otherwise will hopefully get large enough to fight back on the inflation.

But if it was me, I’d just retire. No telling what the world will look like in a few years, nevermind 20. Even if you kept working, there’s no guarantees things’ll get better, maybe entire economy collapses and all that work has been for nothing. Or maybe the humanity collapses, you know.

I’d take all the free time I could muster and spend it as much as practical, on nice enjoyable things and family and friends.

While I don’t agree, I’ll concede I might be in the minority with this stand. But I don’t really believe in a universal intelligence in the first place. There are several, and not all of them are self-serving or marked by the traditionally associated emotionless calculations. There’s emotional intelligence. Social intelligence. And so on.

I don’t pretend to be a philosopher or a psychologist to say what they all are, what they even are if you get down to it, but I do know there’s intelligence in caring for others. There’s intelligence in many kinds of sacrifice too. They just aren’t the classical kind of universal intelligence, because that is defined by self-serving “cold facts” and a fragile attempt at realizing an objective world and objective stance on it, which one can never truly reach or possess. If something like that even is possible.

I stand by my original comment, and I’ll be a bit sad to learn if I’m the odd one out with that take, but I also think these are the kind of things philosophers ought to talk about and not me. What do I know? Maybe my view is distorted by idealism and good expectations, faith in people and the world, that may well be unsubstantiated and entirely delusional.

Sometimes we don’t value stable career or steady income as highly as other pursuits.

I wouldn’t say it’s not intelligent. Just different priorities.

I admire anyone brave and idealistic enough to commit to academia or culture or any similarly less lucrative and extremely uncertain path. Takes some resilience and big balls. You are almost guaranteed to lose a lot of the comforts available to others with that. And yet, they still do it. And we are all better for it. The world is better for it.

And here I am thinking everyone can do this, it’s so weird that a thing like this just never came up with anyone

This is so interesting, since I simply can not tell a difference between the aspartame/acesulfane and actual sugar in fizzy drinks. I guess I have it easy because of that, but I have a somewhat keen sense of taste otherwise, I cook a lot and can detect what the taste is missing or has too much of pretty consistently, and know the “opposite” tastes/ingredients to apply. And wines and such, it’s sort of a synesthesia thing too, since I kind of feel them as something close to colors. But sweet things I have trouble with. I thought, not sure why, this was a human thing, but it’s interesting to hear someone can detect the sweet things granularly! Cool!