[mikkupikku]

How old are you now, and how much of what you believe now is the same as when you were 16-24? It shouldn't be controversial to say that young people are brimming with idealism while being low on experience.

FWIW I think Brexit was dumb but I never felt strongly about any of it because it doesn't effect me in any way. I'm not saying their views on Brexit specifically are likely to change.

[danaris]

I'm in my 40s, and I have only gotten more and more progressive as I've "grown up".

You want to know why?

Because I've met more marginalized people. When I was 16, I didn't know anyone who was openly queer, and I lived in a moderately-affluent, nearly-all-white area of the US.

Now, I know many people who are queer, poor, disabled, and/or people of color, and because I was raised to care about people and believe to value every human life, I want them to be treated as well as I (a middle-class, white, straight, cis man) am.

[mrweasel]

It's funny how people say that: "You'll get more conservative as you grow older". So far that hasn't happened. I basically know zero queer, poor, coloured, disabled or other types of people that might struggle to fit in to modern society, but in the past 30 years I've only become more and more accepting of the choices of others.

Only weird twist is that I have become a royalist.

[JCattheATM]

> It's funny how people say that: "You'll get more conservative as you grow older". So far that hasn't happened.

It's not from 20 to 40, it's from like 50 to 70, as peoples critical thinking skills go and they become more gullible, more susceptible to manipulation and misinformation. It remains to be seen if it will happen with a tech savvy elderly population though.

[danaris]

No; what you describe is certainly a phenomenon that exists, but it's not primarily what people talk about when they say that you'll get more conservative when you get older.

IME, what they mean is two different things:

First, the fact that it can be hard to keep up with change—technological, cultural, all types—for several decades straight. When the world changes dramatically between when you're 10 and when you're 30, and then again between when you're 30 and when you're 50, it can be really hard to be willing to keep changing with it. New things become the enemy. Why in my day, we paid with credit cards by running an imprinter over them with a big ka-chunk, and we liked it! None of this newfangled chip and pin garbage. There are too many chips in things anyway! Etc.

And second, the fact that, before my generation, it was basically a guarantee that as you went from 20, to 40, to 60, you would be getting meaningfully wealthier, and as such, identifying with the financial political issues of your new socioeconomic class...and picking up their cultural politics by osmosis.

But two major things are breaking these assumptions.

The second thing above no longer holds. Starting with younger Gen X and elder Millennials, we just haven't had the opportunities to grow our wealth that our parents and grandparents did at the same ages. We're still identifying with the younger people who don't and can't own homes.

And there's been a tectonic cultural shift during our lifetimes, bringing queer people out into the light in ways that they had never been allowed to be before. Obergefell v Hodges broke open the closet and let gay people come out, and the rest of the queer community has been following them ever since. For those of us who genuinely believe in loving our fellow human beings and giving them true equality, that makes it much, much harder to accept a status quo (or reversions to an earlier one) that denies them those rights, simply because we all really know they're there in a way most of us didn't before.

[JCattheATM]

> No; what you describe is certainly a phenomenon that exists, but it's not primarily what people talk about when they say that you'll get more conservative when you get older.

Strongly disagree. I think it's exactly what is being referred to most of the time.

> Why in my day, we paid with credit cards by running an imprinter over them with a big ka-chunk, and we liked it! None of this newfangled chip and pin garbage. There are too many chips in things anyway! Etc.

Right, this comes down to a decrease in critical thinking ability.

> Starting with younger Gen X and elder Millennials, we just haven't had the opportunities to grow our wealth that our parents and grandparents did at the same ages. We're still identifying with the younger people who don't and can't own homes.

Right, but this has nothing to do with going conservative, but in needing to overhaul the system that allows hording wealth.

[alistairSH]

I’m still a bleeding heart and have been since college. If anything I’ve become MORE liberal over time, as that has allowed me time to realize just how wealthy and privileged I am as a male, white American professional.