Rental Property is it really worth it?

We've owned one rental house for about 5 years now and acquired a second one last year. I don't think there are any really good "rent house" tutorials out there and I find myself gravitating to other landlords for my info and solace. Would I attempt being a landlord if I wasn't retired......I haven't thought about it enough to say yea or nay but it is more work than probably most people realize.
I'll start with saying we bought the first house more out of a desire to protect our own residence. These properties abut each other and are in an older part of town. The pattern here has been to raze the old house and put up a "much improved and, of course, bigger house" for the expanding family....translation...about 3000sf for maybe 3 to 4 people, some are very small people. If this had happened on the property behind us, it would have been tragic for us. In the past 25 years, I've gotten used to the view from my back door. I put in a swimming pool (a necessity in Houston) and it was situated in such a position that if anyone built a large home on the lot behind us, they would almost certainly have built something which would loom over that pool. We don't need that much privacy. We aren't skinny dippers but we do like the view of the trees and birds from the pool. We aren't really swimmers. We are floaters and therefore admirers of nature as we serenely float and marvel at nature around us.
The first couple of rental experiences were sublime. I befriended my tenants and had the passing thought that being a landlord was, "a piece of cake." That changed and, in the interest of brevity, I will save that for later posts.
Suffice it to say, I realized I needed to be a smarter landlord and I would have to work at this situation as hard as any other position I wished to be successful. If this interests you, stay tuned for later posts. Like I said earlier, there aren't a lot of resources out there to prepare you for the landlord experience and I am not sure why that is the case except it is a complex issue and there aren't easy answers. Are there ever???? Thanks for reading.....