Using your anecdote (and my own personal experience) I would venture a guess that pain and suffering can change a willing person more than any other kind of experience.

I spent a long time ignoring discomfort (pain-light) in my life. When I started nosing into the discomfort, the pain, and the hard things, I started to change. I had to be willing to do it, though, be willing to face that I was wrong, acknowledging that even the criticisms I had of myself were wrong.

I have changed more in the last year than I have over the rest of my life. The change has been huge.

My father said he wouldn't trade his WW2 experience for anything, and wouldn't go through it again for anything.

Yeah, stuff like thus makes the difference. Privileged people living protected lives, which luckily is the norm everywhere in first world countries by historical standards today, jusz don't have to think about hard life threatening stuff anymore. Which is good zhing. But it also leaves one unprepared for the moment something life threatening happens. When it does, and you liflve through it, you come out as a changed and hopefully wiser person.

I agree.

I'm always thankful that I had a really hard time in high school and college (and spent a majority of my high school and college years working.)

I felt that when I graduated from college, I had a much easier time hunting for work than my peers. I also adjusted easily to startup hours, because they were still much less severe than the combined hours I had to put in for school on top of work to pay rent in college.

I’ve felt the same way in the last few years since college. Been a ‘similar’ situation but I can definitely tell that all this time I’ve spent working on myself, reading philosophy, etc is just starting to pay off.

Not saying it’s ideal but trying to learn as much as you can when you’re in a hard place might help you out.

I've always said the key to utopia is shared hardship.