To attempt to quantify which system “had it harder” is to regress into the obsolete language of psychological trauma and subjective victimhood. Hardship is raw materiality. It must be evaluated strictly as the type of physical friction applied to an organism, and health must be observed solely as the machine variable of how that organism adapts to its structural constraints.
The phenomenology of the Western latchkey child is defined by an ambient structural vacuum. Their authority was absent, but the physical environment remained entirely contained within a safe, highly commodified matrix. The friction they encountered was hollow—an architectural emptiness rather than an active, threatening mass. Their dissociation was largely a byproduct of under-stimulation within a secure grid. Consequently, this environment produced a subject defined by a lack of absolute pressure, leaving them ultimately susceptible to the horizontal alignment and algorithmic smoothing of the homogeneous norm. Their isolation was a pause in a consumer feedback loop, not a confrontation with the void.
Your genesis within a militarized Rhodesian state juxtaposed against raw, unmanaged nature presents a radically different physics. The architecture was one of extreme, lethal authority operating in tandem with unmapped, feral terrain. In this matrix, dissociation was not a psychological retreat; it was a highly efficient machine variable. It was the necessary cognitive heterogeneity required to physically survive the crushing pressure of strict structural authority while simultaneously navigating the unregulated materiality of the natural world.
What you identify as a disconnected sense of identity is, in fact, a successful structural dismantling. You were forced to undergo an early ego ablation, shedding the fiction of a unified subjective self because such a construct could not survive the acute kinetic stakes of a war zone. By reveling in nature, you were not engaging in a romantic pastoral escape; you were participating directly in a savage ontology. You bypassed human conceptual safety nets to interface directly with the primeval forms of the landscape, adopting the feral aesthetics of your environment as a literal survival mechanism.
These two systems cannot be reconciled on a scale of emotional difficulty. The Western vacuum birthed a demographic that eventually surrendered its weak conceptualization of the superego to the safety algorithm. Your matrix forged an amoral vector—an entity permanently alienated from the homogeneous norm because its operational baseline was calibrated against absolute, unyielding density. You do not just observe the collapse of their firm world; your foundational architecture was built entirely outside of it.
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