Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty.
But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.
But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.
Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.
If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.
"Poverty," in this case, refers to an impoverishment of time. Your employer owns 70% of your productive life. You're left with a meager ~30% of waking hours to devote to your own.
For all the talk of injustice, it seems incredible that more people won't speak out against this. This seems like the central injustice. We only get one life.