Of course, if you’re capable of retiring and not working for the rest of your life, you can be very autonomous. You can also be autonomous if you are a lord in feudal Europe, because in these situations you’ve ascended to a position where other people work to satisfy your material needs. Which is really no autonomy at all because you are reliant on the rest of society to continue to literally work for you.

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.

> Do you really think most individuals in hunter-gatherer societies had true 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.