Money abstracts this away, but if you achieve “financial independence”, that just means you have accumulated enough wealth tokens that you can indefinitely have enough to exchange for things that someone actually had to go make. You’re “autonomous” in the sense that you’re utterly dependent on an entire society that agrees with the practice of doing work in exchange for fiat currency. But the Pharoahs were also utterly dependent on a society that agreed with the practice of doing work because if you didn’t, the pharoah’s bureaucrats wouldn’t keep your land irrigated and you would starve to death.
But autonomy as a person who actually does work is another thing entirely. Industrialization introduced time clocks, shift work, Taylorism, and all kinds of stuff that eroded that autonomy.
Actually, yes I do. It depends on which hunter gatherer society, but there is some indication from Sumerian scripts that before statecraft came a laisser-faire world, where people did not need to respond to a higher power, because one could always choose to bugger off to somewhere else.
It only works of course when there is excess food compared to the amount of humans, which is not a stationary situation as humans multiply to fill that gap.
This is one of the many points Kaczynski makes in his argument that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The complete lack of true autonomy seems inherent to the system.