My answer to this question changed as I grew older, so I didn't vote.
In my teens, I thought work was SO grown-up and fabulous. I was thrilled to go to work and I needed the money.
In my 20's, I thought I could change the world. I was thrilled to go to work and I needed the money.
In my 30's, I wanted to improve the future for my family and I wondered what income and career potential I might have and wanted to find out. I was thrilled to go to work and I needed the money.
In my 40's, I thought I could make a big difference in my field of study if I just worked hard enough, and I was fascinated by what I was doing. I was thrilled to go to work and I needed the money.
In my 50's, I finally had the perfect job and felt that at last, I was making a small but positive difference in my field of study. I was suddenly divorced at 50 so I needed to improve my own future and figure out how to retire when the time came. So I did that by changing my career path from research to the perfect job, a job with a great retirement potential in which I managed and directed research and could still keep in touch with it. Soon there was no room to rise further at my workplace without ditching everything and going into management (which held no appeal for me), and this ceiling on my advancement potential was frustrating at times. In my 50's I developed my own retirement plan and was reaching all the goals laid out by that plan. I still enjoyed the "work" part of my job, but the higher I got in the food chain, the worse the office politics were and I have no interest in that foolishness. I began to realize that even the perfect job was just a job. By my late 50's I was becoming more and more tired of the daily grind, but I needed the money.
In my 60's, I was even more tired of going in and finishing a work day was becoming exhausting to me. Why work and put up with the baloney and knock myself out every day if I could afford to retire? I did want to transfer whatever institutional knowledge I had acquired over the years to a younger, up-and-coming scientist, so I did so. Then, knowing that everything was complete and tied up in a neat package, so to speak, I retired on the day after I was first qualified to retire.
That is what it was like to be ready to retire, at least in my life. I would not have wanted to retire in my 20's or 30's, for example, because I would always have wondered what I might have accomplished in the world had I continued to work.