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As someone that has not only read but reread Atlas Shrugged, I don’t agree with your cause map of why I enjoyed the book as a teenager at all. In fact, it sounds like yet another indictment of libertarians as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” which has always been a poor effort by leftists to use their love of power dynamics and status games to try to explain values anathema to their own. My enjoyment of Rand’s work can be attributed to exactly one personality trait/flaw: I hold in very low regard the kinds of people who insist they have a right to my time or energy.
So her work clicked with you because it was a compatible opinion. Her political stance didn't convert you, it was "yeah, she gets it about moochers and looters!"
If you will pardon me, it's also a teenage trait to be self-obsessed, because that's the time we're trying to figure ourselves out, who we are, and what our place in the world is. The depths of our own selves are endlessly fascinating, because we don't know what we'll pull up when we go trawling there. And that kind of deep gazing takes a lot of time and energy. So naturally "my time and energy is too important and vital, others need to demonstrate they've earned the right to my attention" is a stance appealing to the adolescent who feels pulled every way by the demands of family, school, peers, society and trying to set the quicksilver changes of mind and body into a more fixed shape to develop their own personality and character.
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