Autonoms and individuals

Sometimes I wander whether autonomy is an illusion.

How much are we really responsible for our own actions - or more: how much are we really the original source of our actions - the originator? Isn't everything just subject to the laws of action and reaction, cause and effect? And isn't thus everything we do linked to one or a million events that preceded our action and thus the individual action can never be original and autonomous, because it is always influenced by things we've done before, others have done to us or by values and supposed behavioural patterns that we've learned or been tought.
Of course there's always a choice. Always. (Well, I believe there always is - and if the only OTHER choice is death)
So one can choose to act in a way that is more or less influenced by other things than by the moment and the feeling at the moment, but either way, when looking back onto the action there'll always be ways of explaining it by things that preceded it, no?

Whichever is the case, the thought that we're not autonomous in our actions is a scary one, somehow. But why? Maybe it's just scary to me and others are completely happy with the realisation of our non-autonomy or dependence, if you wish. Or maybe others are happy to be ignorant of it...?
Either way, I think we have a remarkable ability to feel autonomous and in control of what we're doing, just as we have the ability to feel like an individual, like an exception, in complete ignorance of the fact that there's 6 billion other people out there - a number, the magnitude fo which we cannot even grasp - thousands of which are more than likely to have been or to be in exactly the same situation as we are and to feel exactly the same way that we feel in a particular situation.
The first time when that became very obvious to me, was a few years ago, when I was looking down from a plane as I was flying over some parts of urban America, on the eastcoast somewhere, and there was hundreds of houses, all looking the same, in dozens of rows, artificially curved, so as not to look so artificial, with pools located alternatingly once on the left side of the backyard, once on the right, to maintain individuality...
I thought: there's thousands of people living in these houses, who - together - have a million stories, a bagillion issues and a megabajillion problems, but drive the same car, have the same house, all face the same direction when they sit on their toilet or have sex, all have the TV in the same spot in the living room, all watch the same shows at night, all eat the same food from the same supermarket, wear the same clothes from GAP, Levi's, ZARA or H&M and say "I love you" exactly the same way to their 'honeys' every day and are all happy or sad, good or bad, honest or dishonest in exactly the same way that a million other people are.
Yet they are all convinced, as am I, that their problems are unique, that their situations are unparalleled, that their car is special and their having a pool differentiates them from others.


Maybe I'm wrong, though.

Maybe they don't.
Maybe they don't think they're exceptional at all, maybe they're completely aware of their similarities with a million other people, of their non-uniqueness and it's just me, who, having been brought up to think that he's so exceptional, is so scared of the realisation that he's not. -- Hmm. Comments?