That's my point: neither of these items comes under "physiological" or "safety" so the idea of "needing to mow one's lawn" should be questioned.

(I'm thinking of DeAnander's comment way back about a lawn being a desert in re: complex ecosystems.)

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

Keep this shit up wih the arms race mentality and you just may wind up with a society in which most social relations involve extreme hierarchy with neither security nor autonomy for those on the bottom.

Wrong tense, MfM.
The circumstances you fear are pretty much current events.
The last nuggets of security for many was their home equity . Boy, is that a thing of the past. Decent company pension plans or health care packages are an endangered species.
And the company (or school) you work for can and does tell you what to wear, where to live, what politics to profess, what car to drive--
At IBM, everyone wore a suit-- but dark grey suits were forbidden to the lower orders, as that was a "Management color".
You are right to fear the effect of a non-standard opinion on your academic career. At my last university, there were, in 1985, no PhD candidates in the psych department who were not behaviorists--Skinner was king.
When I questioned a faculty member on the issue of the ethical obligation for a social psychologist to hold the welfare of the individual as more important than the task to aid the company to more effectively manipulate the worker, I was told that such "anger-based" attitudes would "negatively influence my career".
Autonomy?  
And this sure was not the bottom.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.