I agree with this, its my experience of "my generation" too, its not even like its restricted a class of low rent impulsive individuals or family units like it may have been years ago either. I do think its a bad thing and I'd say its one of the most pressing social problems of the age if not the most pressing social problem.
Why? I think there's a lot of reasons why, although principle I'd blame consumerism and its norms, they want people to remain children and prioritise easy choice rather than commitments, freedom not as autonomy or responsibility but as a lack of consequences, often the predictable consequences of your actions based on obvious experience.
Its not that consumerism is unnatural or some djinn or genie, its just that the countervailing norms of religion, ideology, even more vague spirituality or philosophy have been steadily eroded and assailed by a variety of opposing forces, some sophisticated, some (and I suspect this is really widespread) a lot, lot less so. A lot of the protest which works in consumerism's favour is pretty much just serving as a cluster of rationalisations, so you get people who consider social sanctions, especially when those same sanctions turn up as their own conscience, a drag dressing their rejection of it as really the most valiant attempt to challenge illegitimate authority, oppression, hating, whatever.
When I talk about consumerism I'm not just talking about capitalism or moneyed exchanges, although that has a lot to do with it, but much broader strokes, the tendency to objectify others, as objects to hate, exploit, control, coerce, compell, cajole and to reduce them to a means rather than an end and to treat everything, people, animals, shared space or resources, scarce resources, without much thought or consideration or reflection. That goes beyond monied social relations to a lot besides, from the casual cruelty of an internet/online troll to "recreational rioters" or gangs of kids who beat up strangers for fun.
Its something which is older than and greater than capitalism itself, which I consider a mess of contradictions all by itself, but its really and truly exploded as a cultural cancer in every economy in the world which attempts to approximate as closely as possible the capitalist ideological precepts and expectations.
Second only to that cultural dry rot I'd consider the endemic ambivalence about aging and the lack of consensus about age which it breeds, kids want to be older than they are, adults want to be younger, a lot of people want to remain in their teens forever, when if they took a step back they might realise it wasnt all it was cracked up to be.
There is no consensus about age, hence you get people like Peter Thatchell, UK gay/sexual rights, campaigner who is bold enough to campaign against there being an age of conscent or the criminalisation of adolescents or those slightly older who behave in a predatory manner towards their younger peers. This to me is one of the worst developments and will probably leave the world in a worse state than it was in when there existed iron and oppressive precepts about age and aging (not that a return to those norms would be likely to be possible or even preferable, it'd probably reflect contemporaneous concerns or dreams about what they where rather than any objectivity about it).