The point is that "escape" in this case means not having to work to American Capitalism levels, not escaping working entirely. Retirement in the FIRE sense does not imply in all cases spending every day by the pool doing nothing, and even in the AmCap sense, most who retire and tend to live longer and (self-reportedly) happier, have some work that they are doing, but more along the lines of what even a medieval serf would have enjoyed to the tune of like 15 hours a week.
ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.
I am thinking of escape as “not having to do things you don’t want to do”.
No one wants to work in the style of American capitalism, so this is one thing that people stop doing, for sure. In prior systems, no matter what you did, you always had to keep doing things you didn’t want to do (assuming one isn’t in love with perpetual farm labor).
If we are talking about Garden of Eden levels of natural abundance hunter gathering, then that is surely peak human lifestyle, but I don’t know of any scalable system that remotely compares to that.
ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.