@gondwanalon We don’t get to pick our personality traits, which are quite stable over life, and are heavily determined by inherited genes and environmental influences.
Highly conscientious types. which I’ll guess you are from what you’ve written, are more goal oriented and want to ‘fit in’ with social norms and societal expectations. It’s really a great trait to have to “succeed” in life, and typical of ‘rags to riches’ stories and those who like to attribute all their success to themselves alone (and dismiss any possible luck or external factors that helped them along the way).
It has some negatives, but it’s generally an adaptive trait to have.
I happen to be lazy (carefree), and score very low on the conscientiousness trait. Despite my intelligence and thinking skills, I’ve an unfortunate combination of other traits that means I’ll never be rich or climb up the career ladder. I’m basically maladaptive to current society, and my intelligence and thinking skills are largely wasted on futile arguments on obscure internet fora.
The thing is, a lot of “lazy and irresponsible” people who make “poor choices” are likely to have better ideas about how to improve society than the “hard working” and “responsible” types. It’s because the latter group, into which I believe you fall, never really felt the need to question or analyse it. It was just a matter of making good decisions and working hard (and pretending you never got lucky in any way at all).
There’s actually some weak evidence (mainly for a lack of studies and methodological difficulties) that conscientious populations make for overall worse societies. Unequivocally, you do tend to vote for dumb conservative arseholes.