You can only get more conservative when you have things to protect like a house and a pension.

Most millennials retirement plan atm is die of heatstroke in 150 degree weather in a 8 person shared apartment in Alaska.

Whenever people say that you grow more conservative when you get older, they're working from the premise that you'll grow more affluent and comfortable later in life. For Americans, that just isn't true anymore. Wages are mostly stagnant, home ownership is much less attainable, and cost of living is at an all time high. Yet for some reason, pundits just can't figure out why millenials aren't getting more conservative as they age, or why zoomers appear to be following this trend.

I’ve only gone further Left.

I grew up in a rightwing household, and unquestioningly drank the koolaid until my late teens. The right's bullshit eventually became impossible to ignore, so I dove right into the 'both sides!' trap and rode the Libertarian train for a while.

It became really easy to articulate what I didn't like about the right; describing what was bad about the left was just echoes of Fox bitching about things like them voting on emotion instead of logic... but no real examples.

Around my mid-twenties I finally realized ^that was projection; then 2016 happened and holy shit they're running Trump and Hillary?? Easily the two most hated candidates in my lifetime... against Gary Johnson - an admittedly goofy personality but likeable and most importantly not crazy, THIS IS THE LP'S TIME TO SHINE! ....yeah they got 3% of the vote. We won't ever see better conditions for a 3rd victory, so, pipedream shattered.

Guess I'll have to just pick a lesser evil, so let's see what we have to work with...

• there's the red team. Burn through our fossil resources with reckless abandon. War, war, war, and more war. Shave social services down to nothing so we can claim 'fiscal responsibility' which is good I guess (hey! eyes down here, we're done talking about the war part), a blatant integration of religion and politics, and they want to make life as miserable as possible for my gay/colored/female/nonchristian friends. Fuck, that's pretty bad...

• Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of... getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things... and... well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants... *checks* ...uhh, nope! Fuck, I'm starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.

So I start voting one issue at a time, crunching both options against eachother and choosing the one that's best for the US. That way there's no bias and I won't be part of this tribal bullshit plagueing our politics.... Weird, when I ignore affiliation and vote on policy alone, my ballot becomes solid blue. What are the odds of that?! Next election, solid blue again. And again.

My desire to be 'independent' on label alone is pretty much gone at this point, and I'm being more and more vocal about supporting leftwing policies. Family isn't a fan, but they hit me with the shit OP is poking fun at - I only shifted blue because I'm poor! Once I make more money, just you wait and see, I'll come crawling right back.

Now, I'm not rich or anything, but I'm (finally!) not living paycheck to paycheck. During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I'm at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life. The thing that pisses me off about those socialized services is WHY THE FUCK DOESN'T EVERYONE HAVE THIS?! So wearing camo for 4 years for some reason got me this VIP tour of what we should should be doing for everyone.

I was a late bloomer, I got there. I haven't missed a single election since 2016, big or small. Solid blue. I've gotten to the point where I'll even look up the voter registration of candidates for nonpolitical positions like judges, and red is a deal breaker.

The better off I become, the more blue I get. The notion of red-shift with income is trash.

I don't know what it's like to live under communism, but I do know what it's like to live under capitalism and it's grip tightens more and more with every passing year.

I am more conservative in the sense that I see things with more nuance. I understand societies are very complex systems in a fragile equilibrium and that my naive solutions to the world's problems are not feasible.

And yet, each day I'm more convinced we need to eat the rich.

Straight up I was conservative as a young teen, because that's what EVERYONE was here in Utah when I was in the LDS church.

Now I just keep floating more and more left as time goes on.

Honestly, if your goals include conserving an inhabitable environment for the human race in the future, conserving a semblance of wealth for everyone but the top, like, dozen people on Earth, conserving the rights of workers and consumers against an overwhelming opposition, conserving democracy for future generations (and all that against the best efforts of a supposedly "conservative" party), your parents may have been right.

“You will be more conservative as you grow older” is not a truth, but a threat. If you don't become a conservative under their regime, you won't become old.

How'd you get a picture of me?

I have become aggressively more anti-capitalist as I've grown older. At 56, with a nice professional career mostly behind me, I am vigorously ANTIFA EAT THE RICH ACAB.

The people who told me that were 100% boomers. There’s that idiotic saying “if you’re not liberal* when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re 40 you have no brains” ok boomer.

Note this is using the US meaning of liberal, not to mean “capitalist”.

In the mid 20th-century, people reliably got more petty bourgeois as they got older.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379422000452

Yup but I have seen it in my peers unfortunately. Honestly though not in the ones who were actually passionate. Like the guy who started the environmental club is as left as he ever was but like the one friend I had I think just parroted what most of his friends said atm.

Seize the means of production

my experience is the opposite

If conservative means "cautious and wary of unexpected results", "disillusioned with methods that we tried and failed with" or maybe even "equipped with experience of successful and failed cooperation with various sorts of people", then yes. Already before age 50, I'm spoiled with various good and bad experiences. I cannot exclude that as my tendency to explore decreases (psychology tends to affirm this trend), I may get prejudiced too. I may have to figure out something to counter it.

But if conservative means that I suddenly don't want a society with equality and without hierarchy, then - nope.

How is it that some of us get further left and some people go right? Even poors and immigrants go right and vote against their own interests. I really don't get it.

Maybe we become more extreme in our existing beliefs. My political compass position drifted right from bottom left as I hit my thirties. After the Iraq invasion of 2003 and recessions following 2008 it swung back towards Ghandi. I became convinced that conservative politics isn't working in my late forties and that has only been reinforced as I try to access the creaking UK healthcare system.