…the great majority (of people) prefer the work phase’s evenings and weekends. We like to be able to decide what to do with our lives. Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.
He also finds a common theme in people who have done such a change:
They observe the relationship between their happiness and their spending, and they stop wasting their income on things that don’t return much happiness. The main difference between the ER (early retirement) crowd and regular working people is that they strive to be rational with their money, in terms of what it actually does for their quality of life.
There’s quite a few links with more material at the end of that article, if this topic interests you.