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> I’m constantly being dragged back into my former life!

> It must be the price to be paid for the Nobel.

That reminds me of a study a decade ago or so, showing Nobel laureates to enjoy a ridiculously higher life expectancy, in comparison to people who were merely nominated for the prize. It was something like 5 extra years, IIRC, and there was no other profession or status symbol even close.

Other nominees are unlikely to have significantly less access to healthcare, or be otherwise depraved.

So what's so unique about a Nobel? The hypothesis was that the Nobel is the only absolut "Game Over: You Win" scenario in existence, allowing its bearer to escape the rat race and its deleterious effects. Start-up or banking billionaires clearly aren't satiated by their money, so they continue on to space, or ocean racing, or becoming really bad politicians. Nobel laureate are done.

Is it not just survivorship bias? Nobel Prizes are often awarded decades after the fact, and (except in a couple edge cases) are never awarded posthumously. Being long lived makes you more likely to receive the prize in your lifetime, not necessarily the other way around.
They are never awarded posthumously. But my completely unreliable gut instinct is to believe that most honourees are in their 50s and 60s, and that too few people die before that age for it having a significant impact here.

Plus, of course, nominees tend to be very similar in most regards including age to the eventual winners.

On the contrary, consider Ralph Steinem [0], who was awarded the Medicine prize in 2011, three days after his death. The news had not yet reached the prize committee. There are a couple others[1,2] from decades past that were nominated before their death, and the committee selected them after their death, but that loophole was closed in 1974.

As I said, edge cases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_M._Steinman

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Axel_Karlfeldt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskjold

This premise is predicated on the "how much is enough" theory. Higgs kept teaching at Edinburgh University for years and years, because he loved his work. The exploded 'maslow' theory has this quality which is sort-of half true: if your intent was to find stuff out (tm) then your fuck-you money is probably a lot less than Elon Musk, or George Soros.