Isn’t it more nuanced? In order for someone to not need a wife for laundry service, we rely on the manufacturer. We rely on electricity.
It seems like we become more tightly dependent (single directional graph) on more people in order to feel superficially less intertwined.
I think people need other people more than ever. We just might not need them to be our masters or servants.
We rely on having money. And we rely on a mature economy where someone is willing to solve every problem in exchange for that money.
In an individualistic society, each person is expected to earn their own way and then pay to solve every problem they may have.
In more community-oriented societies, personal earnings are less important than a strong network of friends and family who can fulfill every need. Each person's income/wealth is contributing to the collective for whatever cannot be served internally.
This movement toward individualization correlates very strongly with the capitalism.
and as this community grew, accounting for such "favours" between friends/family become more important, and thus, the need for unit of accounts - aka money. You'd end up replicating the current system when given long enough time and a large enough community.
These societies tend to keep those communities smaller - immediate family plus some closer relatives and family friends. Then there are broader networks with shallower ties where business is favoured but money will usually change hands.
This idea never made sense to me. Capitalism is organized around people self-organizing to form companies. One man companies don't get much of anything done. There's nothing whatsoever about free markets and capitalism that prevents or discourages people working together.
BTW, even small voluntary collectives don't work. Jamestown didn't work, the first year the Pilgrims tried a collective didn't work, the kibbutzen in Israel doesn't work (they get subsidized by the government funded by taxes on capitalists).
Money as a facilitator for the exchange of goods and services long, long, long predates the rise of capitalism.