With that income, you could work at your lesiure and tell your boss to stick it should the working conditions not meet with your demands and/or expectation.

Investment guru Bob Brinker would call it "Critical Mass". That is if you had a million, you could retire if you wanted, or you could keep working if you wanted, or you could go to work for a non-profit charitable agency if you wanted.

Of course, many people couldn't survive on only a paltry 53k per year... So they wouldn't consider $1 million to be "critical mass".

Most people could definitly get by, assuming they didn't squander away the $1 million and restricted themselves to only spending the interest income.