American-style "freedom" means you can zip around the world and buy toys and choose from 200 varieties of soda. Autonomy means that as you go through your daily activities, nobody is riding you -- you're not micromanaged, coerced, or denied participation in power.
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The techno-elite, lacking experience in bad jobs, don't understand what makes a job bad. The reason we hate low-status jobs like burger-flipping and toilet cleaning is not that they're physical or dirty. We love to do physical and dirty things like work on our own cars and tend our own gardens and play sports and go on hikes. The jobs are bad because the story they're part of is "you do what I say," and because the focus is on quantity or speed, rather than quality. Our quantity-worshipping culture thinks "sustainability" means not running out of kilowatt-hours, but it's even more critical for a system to not run out of human will, to be psychologically sustainable.

At the end of that post I've just stuck a link to this 2024 article, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. The author moves from eeevil behaviorism, which does not even acknowledge the existence of intrinsic motivation, to Self-Determination Theory, "a legitimate scientific enterprise, and yet outside of certain academic circles, its ideas don't receive any air time at all." The basic conclusion is that intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I would add, society is falling apart because autonomy and competence are more scarce than ever, while relatedness is being monopolized by the culture wars.

Also, here's a 2025 PsyPost article on intrinsic motivation, What really keeps people committed to long-term goals?