The other side of things, kind of rounding out the child-like analogy, is that the exposure to opportunity is limited similarly to the exposure to responsibility. Engineering hire number 14,162 might make it to middle management if [s]he sticks around long enough.

If you combine this with the trajectory that a lot of smart folks end up on -- home, college, grad-school, large corporation -- I think there's a natural disenfranchisement when kids that thought they were going to change the world and be astronauts when they grew up realize that they're staring down a few decades of project management meetings and internal bureaucracy.

Added to a smooth transition from their parents to their company taking care of all of the hard parts of life, it does lead to an odd form of young adulthood where a lot of folks are too afraid of deviating from the prescribed path to break out and do something that's more fulfilling to them.