Part of growing up is learning that the house always wins. And that rather than fighting windmills you need to stand next to them and collect the loot and XP left over from all the fools that do.
Jokes aside though you both completely missed the point of what I was saying.
The point is that there is a period in ones life, roughly corresponding with the period of young adulthood when the average person is objectively at the worst possible point of what their life is ever going to be in terms of stress.
Children live in what is essentially a golden cage. Sure, things aren't perfect but realistically a child or teenager does not actually have any real life altering struggles to deal with. Being popular in school or having good grades is not even on the same planet as having to actually worry about paying for your own food and clothes or having to worry if you can afford rent this month. To be a child is frankly comparable to being a pet. All you have to worry about is making sure the guy feeding you thinks you are cute.
Older adults are in a similarly decent position. If you played your cards right by the time you reach a certain age you will have already established your self sufficiently that they have a stable position in society and economy. Sure, you might not become rich or famous or what ever other thing people dream of as kids. But you know where they are going, where you can reasonably get and that the worst part is behind you. And hopefully this includes a comfortable or at least reasonably tolerable life style.
But those years in the middle are where you have to work the most and see the least benefit from that work because so much effort has to go into building up for the future. Going to university, internships, entry level jobs, getting married and having go through the starting stages of figuring out how a family is supposed to work and getting your own home all happen in this relatively short period of time for most people. So it's natural that it is in this period that they have the most incentive to try and change the world and the least to loose from gambling on harebrained schemes to do so. Especially once you consider just how much of a shock it is going from the carefree life they had before to suddenly having to work for a living.
At the same time this period overlaps with the time in ones life where one simply does not have enough life experience dealing with the real world to make good decisions. And when you combine those two it's very easy for manipulative sociopathic conman to get them to believe in propaganda and lies and convince them that utopia is just one dead jew, imprisoned communist or purchased NFT away.
fwiw i understand what you're trying to say. it was just a bad quote, since it attributes brains to, again, embracing abuse.
some notes.
first on the brain, just to hopefully outline how problematic the "wisdom of age tending towards conservatism" is.
personally my history was the reverse. i grew up in a conservative environment and was very socially sheltered (among other things, which i'll touch on quickly below). i was a stupid kid. i had no conception of societal poverty, and entered my teenage years quite right-wing. since, i have only grown increasingly distant to that shroud of being covering up the ills of the system. contrary to your notions of housing and building a life, it rather has the underbelly of dirty consumption. the life connected to this "brain" will make prosperity impossible. embracing it and not doing anything about it just because you're comfortable - it is simply not growing up and getting wisdom and a brain.
it's stupid. like, abhorrently, bafflingly, ridiculously stupid. it's getting a convenient life and then turning around and whining about possible slight inconveniences that
could make life
fundamentally possible for others in the future. so i grew up and turned vaguely left. not because of dreams or propaganda or lack of experience, but because
i got smarter.
as you may be able to tell, i wouldn't care so much for this if not for the climate crisis. i wish it didn't exist. i wouldn't care one bit about the way people lived otherwise. they do them. i'm perfectly content with my economic prospects otherwise. the issue is that they don't do them, they do everyone.
and secondly, on stress, like, i don't know.
i think you harshly underrate the burdens of stress on life today, and i think you underrate how increasingly it is a pipe dream to settle down somewhere when you're older. i'll also say that while my cage was socioeconomically golden, it was not without active abuse under the power of careless people, and i'm nowhere near alone in this. this golden cage is often a lie, and trying to
actually make it golden gets
harsh reactions from the right. and while this
could explain why I became such a vaguely dirty leftie or whatever, it's simply not the same for each kid with abuse. there's plenty of people much worse than me, and they go straight radical right libertarian.
like for some of those that achieve the middle class dream, sure, they simply don't have as much to worry about. for others, it's not the case.
also, as i say a lot elsewhere - i know what you mean with "the real world", but it's a really unfortunate phrasing (as is the phrase that sparked this whole bit); a child's world is simply, concretely, not unreal. it's as real as everyone else's. it's especially a frustrating phrase since, like the brain, it appeals to something incredibly construed, and actively attempting to hide its dangerous premises.