It's also worth noting he's not actually retired, he's actually a self-employed handyman and also says in the article his wife works too and plans on working more when their boy is older.
Mr. Money Mustache defines "retired" as being able to do whatever he enjoys, including work he enjoys. From what I can tell by reading his blog for the past couple of months, he has no desire to sit around on a beach or play golf all day.
How do you define retired? His passive income from investments exceeds his total expenses + inflation so he doesn't need the part time income. Maybe you want to call it financially independent, but I'd say I was retired if I didn't have to work.
Actually I think calling it 'financial independence' would head off a bunch of knee-jerk reactions and make it a lot easier to have a real discussion about.
It's not a knee-jerk, he's just using a very well known term that has a specific meaning. It means to cease all work. All. He hasn't. He even admits it in the linked article but justifies it because it's doing what he wants. Retired means not working. He works.
If you're working for money you're not retired. There's even a whole spiel in the link above about how they tried to become property developers which failed when the market collapsed, which is actually a lot of work.
I'd buy semi-retired. Or he works part-time. But retired has a very specific meaning that he is ignoring. He just seems to be confusing 'I enjoy my new job' with 'I don't work' just because he didn't like working 9-5 as a programmer or whatever it was he did.
Retired as meaning not working at all is not a universal definition. Most people in the financial independence circles define it as not having to work for a living. As long as you can choose whether or not to work, you can say you're retired.
