silvercookoo I'm glad being controlled by your parents worked for you, but if I'd tried to follow my parents' preferred path I'd have dropped out and been deeply unhappy.
Didn't help that my parents modelled unhappiness and stress and rarely being around as the outcome of the path they chose, and wanted their children to follow them down. Yes, they have plenty of money in retirement, but my mother was miserable and resentful for as long as I can remember and very open about counting down to the earliest possible retirement. She's spent her retirement rattling about her big house and gardening, and interfering in other people's lives because she's bored. My father enjoyed his career to the point that it became transparent in later years that he'd rather be at work than anywhere else, which of course made my mother increasingly miserable and put upon, but also made retirement almost impossible for him to cope with, and he's struggled massively since becoming too frail to work.
I hope to be working until my late 60s because I enjoy working and enjoy my job, and have a good work life balance. It is only one element of my life, so when I eventually retire I hopefully will cope just fine without it, but going to work adds rather than detracts from my life and I'll be in no rush to retire.
A lot of doctors, especially female ones, are very unhappy and burnt out in their 40s these days - the salary is compensation for senior hospital doctors but not necessarily GPs, especially women trying to combine the job with children. It's not the ticket to the top 5% it once was unless you don't want kids. For men who don't want children or have a wife willing to carry the whole domestic load (or less often if course women with a husband or wife willing to) it still can be. Not what I'd hope for for my children unless they had a genuine vocation.
As lot of jobs in pure science are actually fairly poorly paid. It's a myth that any stem degree is a ticket to a high salary.