You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.
Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.
Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.