Increasingly I'm convinced that the signifiers only demonstrate meaning in a shorter-term sense. They aren't nothing, but someone in their 20's is mostly whatev

Increasingly I'm convinced that the signifiers only demonstrate meaning in a shorter-term sense. They aren't nothing, but someone in their 20's is mostly whatever they've been groomed for. And good grooming can definitely "set you up for life", except that as a survival strategy it relies on staying in your lane and playing to win precisely the kinds of social games you were taught you should be playing. Nothing's wrong with winning like that - we seem to gravitate towards the behavior when there is social competition - but it just isn't the same as surviving. Someone can be brilliant, athletic, held in high esteem, and die young in a self-inflicted car crash. Personal survival is the ultimate filter but only manifests over the course of decades; someone at 20 "has potential" simply because they haven't been cut down yet. And each time a generational cohort narrows itself down a little, some of the people left over become winners by default, and consequently have more room to define what winning looks like based on their own experiences as survivors, which has upsides(raw experience) and also downsides(survivorship bias). I think that's a major differentiator in the young elite's success from that of older people with more modest backgrounds; the older cohort survived until opportunity appeared, the younger ones had a maximum of opportunities dangled near them from the beginning. There's a definite limit to how much opportunity can go around at any given moment, and much of it is because of how society currently coordinates itself, not an intrinsic limit on our resources. But in terms of "sufficiently smart and motivated given the chance", it's mostly about that near-term readiness to step in and play a highly specific role that unlocks the access to resources, not their overall level of development as a human; being the best and being good enough are not that far apart. There are tons of people that sideline themselves from ambition because they'd just rather not.