I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook growing up. It was based on the things adults told me, e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world.

Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out!

I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.