A person who survived scarcity develops a specialized navigation system for limited resources. That same intelligence stalls when placed in a fundamentally different context where the survival map no longer applies. The failure isn't weakness, but mismatch between the internal model and new terrain.
Resilience is not a general capacity, it's a navigation system. And every navigation system was built for a specific kind of terrain. The person who learned to survive scarcity is extraordinarily good at reading scarcity. They know how to find the next door when one closes, and they know in their bones that the environment always has more options than it appears to. That's not a belief, it's a skill earned the hard way. But put that same person on a different kind of terrain, one their navigation system has no map for, and something strange can happen. The very intelligence that kept them alive stops, and it stops working not because they've become weak, but because the system that was calibrated to a world that no longer matches what's in front of them
