It’s noteworthy that relationships are entirely left out of this article.
If you think about relationships being about giving and receiving, then what more valuable resource can you give someone than your time?
I think the issue many are running into with this article is that autonomy is a complicated subject and it covers whatever you're thinking isn't covered here.
The author obviously didn't have this in mind.
"doing whatever you want" does not equal to "stuff that satisfies for very short periods of time (i.e. not only drugs, games and tv)"
If you are in a good relationship, you can’t do whatever you want any day. The goal of the article is fundamentally incompatible with the sacrifices required for a good relationship with another human being.
Someone doesn’t get what they want in that scenario and a compromise has to be made.
"Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Note that this doesn't apply to one particular set of people, individuals with families or real obligations and people who depend on them.
You're much less good to them (up to the point to being an absentee parent because e.g. you work too much) if you don't have autonomy.
If I'm not doing one of those things I'm working, fixing something around the house, cooking, or running an errand. What I don't have is the privilege to do anything aside from what must be done.
Don't get me wrong, I love having a family but that's kind of my point: autonomy isn't worth a damn to me.
That's still autonomy, since getting into that was your decision to make. Nobody put a pistol on your head to start a family and have kids (hopefully). That's something you chose, with the restrictions that come with it. You could might as well not have started a family, and thus not having to do that.
(Not to mention that if you had more money you could delegate most of those, including making milk and changing diapers, to some helpers, and only keep the "quality" time).
Now, imagine to still "lov[ing] having a family", but being so poor you couldn't afford to start one (or nobody would marry you, because you're, say, homeless). Or having to work double shifts just to make ends meet, and only being able to be minimally present for your kids, despite wanting to be there more. That's lack of autonomy.
You do have to understand Covid changed a lot of the calculus around kids for a lot of parents. Everything has been affected: the amount of help and support you can get, the activities you can do with them.
> Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”
Sure you could hire help and free up more time. And that's a choice many people make. But it wouldn't sit right with me to have someone else teach my children to read, or build robots, or ride a bike if I really have the free time to do it myself.
As long as time is limited and we can't replicate ourselves to be in more than one place, some lack of autonomy is expected. But nobody talked about total autonomy here. The post, and I, mean the casual autonomy to not to be forced to do something you didn't chose at any point.
Young children you can chose to have or not (and take the time hit that goes with it).
Whereas if you have no money and need food and rent and so on, not working is not a choice.
Autonomy is not about having all free time all the time. It's about chosing how you want to spend your time (if that - like having kids - comes with restrictions, those are still your choice, since you opted to that).
Lack of autonomy is when you can't opt out - like when you don't want to have kids but your parents force you to an arranged marriage, or when you want to have kids but can't because you can't afford it, or when you want to spend time with your kids/family but need to work, and so on.