It has little or nothing to do with age, "selling out" begins as soon as culture is packaged as consumable goods. You write a book, it sells well, you're now we

It has little or nothing to do with age, "selling out" begins as soon as culture is packaged as consumable goods. You write a book, it sells well, you're now wealthy and invested in maintaining the system you railed against a minute ago. Meanwhile, others will want to be like you, so will start packaging and selling their output; and consumers will continue to pay for the feeling of belonging to your cultural sphere. Same for music and songs, video and film, and so on. Very few people really ever opt out of these mechanisms. At a macro level, consumer society will automatically fagocitate any cultural output - because to experience culture is to consume it, and guess what the system is specialised in? Producing, selling, and refining at infinitum, anything that can be consumed. Everything else is just the natural outcome of this phenomenon.