My experience was the same and I note your emphasis on the word willingly. I suppose it depends where you worked. If you were in a series of companies that went bust you probably know more people who involuntarily were forced to move on to other things. At least every ten years there has been a major downturn. I can think of the oil crisis, two gulf wars, the 2008 financial crisis and now Corona to name but a few things that caused problems for aviation employment. Add in the move from three man to two man cockpit when I was starting out and people with loss of licence insurance deciding they had had enough of low cost bottom feeders and the numbers who have packed it in early mounts up. There has been tremendous growth in pilot jobs over the last ten years. But a lot of those have been taken by people under 43. Probably an outlier, but even legacy carrier captains choose to move on. For example Carlo Kitzlinger the actor in 7500 was a Lufthansa A320 captain.