Whats even funnier is that a fair portion of the <14% that have been "retired" for more than 4 years arent living totally off their portfolios. My wife still works a couple of days a week and her job covers most of our health care. I *was* fully and truly independently retired for more than 3 years before we got married, but its definitely not a "pure" ER. We could get by fine without her income and paying our own HC, but she likes her job and it sure solves a couple of problems that many ER's run into.
Off the top of my head, with only a handful of exceptions, most of the ER's I'm familiar with have a part time job, spouse works, they have income from book writing or some financially advantageous "hobby".
I also know several who did go back to work, some that subsequently re-retired, some of those went back to work again, and some of those re-re-retired. Whether the moves were financial, boredom-induced or just a great opportunity is hard to say. You dont get the straight story from most folks most of the time. We might all be dogs or 17 year old girls from Missoula (happy birthday uncle mick!).
It also makes it hard to form and state opinions. I've long held to the idea of doing so on the basis that the output was to someone who was or planned to be fully and independently retired with no job related income, probably before the age of 55. Turns out that theres about 1% of the board that are actually doing that and maybe another percent or two who actually will do so.
You can also tell the "really" retired, long term folks as they're almost always the most conservative investors...in the traditional sense. The really brave, balls to the wall folks often have some sort of income thing going, have gone back to work periodically (or will), have a working spouse and/or have only been retired during the current bull market. Be interesting to see how things go around here during the next big bear. And we'll sure have one.
The whole intertubenet wasnt fully functional and no reasonable substitutes existed prior to the big run since 1994. I suspect that "lower end (1-4M) FIRE's rarely met or discussed their situations or kibitzed on lifestyles or investments. So we have no idea really how it went "way back when"...