If you want yuyujiteki no seikatsu wo suru, to live the life of Riley, in Japan, then you should learn as many four-kanji expresssions as you can. (Yuyujiteki implies living in unsurpassed comfort for the rest of your days, an admirable goal if there ever was one.)
The ideal life balancing work and ease is expressed in the lovely phrase seikoudoku, or "clear tilling, rain reading," which means "on clear days till the field outside, on wet days read books inside." Nice work if you can get it.
Four-kanji phrases are, to my mind, the key to being articulate in Japanese. They are terse and profound at the same time.