It's all about how you arrange your priorities. You need to sit down and figure out what's important to you.

My list:

1. My relationship with my son
2. My money
3. My muscle

That's the order. All my decisions start with the question "how will this affect those things?"

I'm and old guy here. You have a few different things going on in this post.

1) Doing what you enjoy in life. Don't grind away trying to make money and not enjoy what you do. Agree with that,

Find something you enjoy, can make a good living at and has good outlook for jobs. Try to work for yourself if you can or if you want to do that. Some like myself, I've made a good earning and just doing the 9-5 type role, I enjoy my time outside of work. Worked for me.

2) Get a life, make friends, have a family,etc Family can be great or they can be a drain. I have boys, they are great. Did I get lucky? Or did they follow my lead?

My boys are great, their Mom, not so much. Left her a long time ago and now found a LTR girl, we keep finances separate.

The hardest thing in my life was living with that bitch until my boys were old enough "legal terms", to choose which parent to live with.

Having a family, getting married and having kids, expect to sacrifice things.

3) get hobby's, get interests, ideally ones that keep you active/fit.

an old professor gave me this advice when I was a young student.

Life is.

Health, happiness and wealth, in that order.

Life is not much fun without your health, take care of yourself

Who cares if your rich and healthy, but not happy

Being financially comfortable, sure solves a lot of problems, not all of them, but it makes it much easier

Some people balance it right. You need enough but only enough. You are not only a long time dead but also if you are unlucky a lot of old age can be unhealthy time when you are not capable of much except social interaction. So do make sure you chase those physical and adventure goals all through until they are taken away by fate.

This also shows the worthlessness of chasing sluts for short term sex late into life. You need to build something if you want to be cared about when old. Of course there is an element of luck. LTRs are not a great bet for men these days. You can do your best but its a long journey and people can change on the way. Women get hard to live with when your luck is down or if you grow apart.

your definition of retiring early is the problem

Make money work for you is the very out there and beneficial piece of advice

But not via stocks etc

Buy and sell things,

Go get your capital however it may be

Find a business idea of some sort

Implement and action

One of the first pieces of advice il give you is to read rich dad poor dad and then secondly learn to actually sell to people without discussing the product, sell your self and the way you do business not the product but drop the idea that you’ve gotta work 70 hours a week in a nursing home and consider that making buck, that’s slavery. Just do your time, get your capital, move onto the next phase

Good luck

"enough" to live on is great, until there's some major catastrophe - IMO "enough" needs to be enough to completely move to a new geography, if it's going to see you through catastrophes. When I look at the worst situations of the 20th century, one lesson pops out - there is no such thing as shelter in place, if it gets bad, you need to move, and that's expensive - doubly expensive when everyone's trying to move...

So, "enough" isn't enough I'm afraid, unless where you live is blessed with a long period of stability...

Both. But balance can be incredibly hard or even impossible..

I am an entrepreneur who is very close to his parents. The fact I'm very close in combination with the fact they're already in their 60's makes me want to spend as much time as possible with them. Currently I have no problem doing so. I have a shitload of free time.

But here comes the dilemma - I live in a country with 50% income tax. Relocating to a tax free or single digit tax country would give me the ability to retire 50% earlier (probably 20 years earlier). But it would mean having to spend 9 months a year abroad to avoid getting taxed. Aka not being able to see my family 9 months a year while they're still healthy & adventurous. I decided for now that family is more important to me than the 50% tax I'd save. Simply because money comes & goes - loved ones only come once.