I get you, because I’ve been down this line of thought as well. But I’ve concluded the whip hand is not even that of society, but nature itself. Everyone is driven by the biological need to eat, at the end of the day.

So how did your great grandfather eat? Where did this readily available food come from?

Would other people provide him with endless food while he did this philosophizing? I imagine that any society, whether advanced megalopolis or tribal village, has a limit to their generosity towards complete nonproducers and would eventually demand something out of them, even if it’s just the output of that philosophizing. Someone had to work to produce that readily available food, I would think.

If he grew/harvested his own food, then he’d be lucky if he never experienced a stressful or even deadly event of pestilence, drought, or even injury to himself rendering him incapable of doing the quite hard work of growing and harvesting it.

Producing food is hard work and modern technological capitalism can be seen as a process of creating more and more layers of abstraction between food producers and the mouths that need to be fed, and doing it more efficiently at that to generate more spare time for other activities like leisure or philosophizing.