Things were a bit slow during the last six months of my employment, not anything to do with me. So I spent some time researching early retirement. I mean, I had researched it quite a bit and already told my boss I was likely leaving at the end of March, but I continued educating myself.
You’re making good money, so enjoy that while you can. But retirement could continue to look increasingly better and work increasingly worse as the ability to retire draws closer. Kinda like senioritis. Workitis.
Job dissatisfaction was a big reason, I certainly might have stayed a couple years longer if I enjoyed it more (and I did enjoy it mostly). I was two years into a California filing. I developed a tiering system to improve rating which had a bit of traction but management wanted it peer reviewed and it just didn’t go anywhere. And we had ambitious plans for a countrywide rollout but never had the resources to get things moving very quickly. That would just drag on forever and be repetitive, and maybe it was better that someone else owned that from start to finish.