If I understand MMM's point correctly, if you have a tradeoff between substantially relinquishing control over how you spend your time and life energy while riding that fancy bike on one side, and having full control of how you spend your life energy without the carbon wheels, you very likely will be better off going for the latter. Even though it doesn't seem like a good choice to you now.
And the way I look at it, you're very likely better off making the choice that you prefer. I've lived frugally and I'm glad that I did. By some standards my wife and I continue to live frugally relative to our means, but it's also clear that our lifestyle has been expanding over the last 10 years. I like the expanded life-style better than the older lifestyle, even if I've needed to work an extra 5ish years to create it.
But that's also my / our choice, and it's not the right choice for many.
Like most of us here, I think Tesla is going to be a multi-trillion market cap company, probably in the next five years. So if you are about to hit your retirement target, you are likely to greatly surpass it if you keep working a few more years and stay long TSLA.
My only addition here - for me and my household, we've got a number that represents "enough". That doesn't mean that I plan to stop growing the pile after that, but our need to optimize that growth has wained. I do like the pile getting bigger, but I like having my time back to do other things more. But that's our personal choice.
My point here for anybody reading, is there a point where you have "enough"? And what is that?
Sometimes I keep dreaming that I should try to prove her wrong about the whole "you'd have nothing to do all day" thing, but maybe it's ok not to. Not yet. Given my current situation I figure maximum of 5-10 years of working at the level i'm working now, while still enjoying all the extra stuff, and I'll be set.
My father-in-law has this point of view about me retiring (being left with nothing to do all day). And I think it's a reasonable one. My solution - my company provides access, post-retirement, to a program called Encore. The idea is to get new retirees involved in their local non-profit community, start meeting new people in that world, and to start building that new network of people outside of my current network of people at work. I plan to make use of that but I am also looking forward to giving back to the world in this fashion, and in much less than a full time role.
I also have this hypothesis for me, that I like what I do so much that I will do it for free (or a token paycheck). I believe what I do would be valuable to non-profits and I know that very few of them can afford me, but anybody can afford free! My only answer, today, to this hypothesis is that I don't donate my time while I'm working full time as well (so I don't like it that much).
So important considerations, not to be dismissed. I have read too many different observations that retiring when you define your value as a human being in terms of your job, without something new to define oneself is a good way to pass from this world a few years later. This IS something I worry / will find a way to do something about, but am not using to hold back from buying back my time.
Things I always wanted to do, but couldn't afford (or more correctly, couldn't justify) previously. My new justification is YOLO, but within reason. This of course will delay the time when I'll be able to quit working, because I'm not selling TSLA for those expenses but using the income. But maybe that's not a bad thing. My wife believes truly retiring too early or even talking about it is "stupid", because you'd have nothing to do all day. Basically don't retire just for the sake of retiring. She'd rather we both keep working (without too much overworking), but then use the extra money we have now to enjoy the life, get the expensive hobbies we couldn't before, travel more and to more exotic places (currently on hold due to COVID obviously).
