I’m at such an intersection of privilege that I don’t think I considered politics in any meaningful way until my early 20s when I got hit with the libertarian propaganda and realized that maybe the police and army are political actually.
I always hear of people doing such great work and being so political in their teenage years ago I wonder if it’s more common for someone to not engage in politics until adulthood line myself or if it’s truly just my position in life that allowed me to be ignorant for so long.
I remember buying a shirt with “fuck politics I just want to burn shit down” when I was around 17 and honestly edginess was I think my entire ideology at the time
I’m pretty certain yours is a pretty normal political experience - above average really, considering you’ve actually engaged with political theory enough to see the world from a wider perspective at any point in your life. You will find people who were politically aware from quite an early age, but they have material circumstances that steered them that way - my parents were already Marxists, so I was attending protests while still in a pram, but that’s not an avaerage childhood.
I like to chalk it up to my insatiable urge to be correct. Every other political ideology I encountered would eventually hit a major inflection point where the contradictions stopped making sense. “Wait, how is the company town functionally different from a regular town? Wouldn’t the ‘taxes’ be taken in the form of less wages to pay for infrastructure?”