Could you say more about that? I don't think of it as patronage and I agree with this statement:
"Corporations only pay you money to exert your brain towards some goal." but in my experience you can go to a corporation and say "I'm really interested in working on <this thing>, are you interested in that sort of stuff?" And if they are they'll start paying you money to explore that thing with them. I did exactly this the first time I "retired", I'm really fascinated by software defined radio and I was exploring how it works and what one could do with it and a friend said, "I'm working at a company that needs help understanding how to do repeatable software and they are doing a lot of SDR work." Which led to a conversation with the CEO that led to a job offer where I helped their software teams get better and I got to use the multi-million dollar RF lab to continue my explorations. Granted my role was "technical leader" and not "programmer" but how I spent my time was a joint agreement between the company leadership and my interests. I wouldn't expect a company doing accounting software to pay me to design SDRs of course.
And if you passion is something completely different then that can be the case too. A executive I met at IBM retired and has gone head first into their actual passion which is art history. They didn't major in it at school or try to get a job in it because those jobs didn't pay them what they wanted but now that they are retired they are spending their time in libraries and museums all over the place digging into the nuances of various bits of art. Are they "working"? Yes in the sense that they are doing the same thing they would have done if someone had hired an art history major apparently :-).
