I spent 25 years in the military right out of college. Yes, it came with long hours, a year in Afghanistan, and two kind of suck injuries. But in trade, the military paid for a BA, two MAs, and a Ph.D. I retired ~3 years ago with a combined pension and VA disability worth enough to be a complete layabout if I chose. I teach part-time at a University and continue my Ph.D. research (with “tenure-lite”) while wearing sandals, cargo shorts and hoodies. I think I'd go crazy if I didn't do something, and I love teaching and my research.
Three companies have tried outright poaching me from my bucolic university work. My response: “You want me to give up my almost entirely unsupervised vagabond academic lifestyle to wear a suit for 40+ hours a week, when I literally can quit my current job and still make $10 an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year literally doing nothing. Plus, cost-of-living adjustments and pocket change healthcare. Can you top that?”
Gods, the horrors I read here–I'd tell the highlighted r/antiwork supervisors, managers, and CEOs to lick my sack, then charge them a $$$ consulting fee. Yes, I traded 25 years of my life to Uncle Sam, but man, it's so nice knowing I can't be threatened by money or healthcare.
EDIT: adding some context. Yes, some of the crappy military leader caricatures you see in books, film, and TV are absolutely accurate. But, at least in my military experience, there was a general sense of tacit trust and looking out for one another. For example: need to go to the doctor? Pick up a kid a school? Take your car to the shop? Take a day off? Leave early one day for an event? Just ask your supervisor. As long as they know how to contact you, you just go and do it. You might just be granted a free pass and not charged leave–and even with leave, you'd get a month off every year and could bank two months of leave (or 75 days if deployed). And unused leave must be reimbursed to the servicemember. I retired with 60 days of unused leave, which I used for a nice -pre-retirement holiday. When I switched from the Army to the Air Force, the Army paid my leftover leave in cash (I can't recall why, but I couldn't transfer it to the Air Force). There's no paperwork, PTO, timesheets, or other crazy HR things to deal with, just handshakes and “I've got your back” trust in the unit. I mean, it blows my mind hearing about corporate stiffs being charged PTO to do normal life things that in the military would get a slow, casual wave from a supervisor. Our lives certainly sucked intensely on occasion and sometimes for long durations, but we tried to make it suck less when we could. Even knowing I'd be injured again, I'd still go back to the “we're a team, let's take care of each other” leader model over working for a CEO screaming about pity parties holding up next quarter's numbers and their own bonus.