"Consistently" is too strong a word. We have ended up where we are today, but let's not pretend societies didn't explore a lot of dead ends along the way. Sometimes very destructive dead ends, with many dead.
Nor can we state that today is the "best of all possible worlds", and that we wouldn't have ended up somewhere better had the advice of elders been heeded more often.
This is a case of survivorship bias.
Love, joy, excitement, mourning, creating art, singing and dancing… All of these are unconditional, intimate, and creative acts.
When they are turned into slot machines and side hustles they lose their humanity. There is nothing creative about the 50,000th “influencer” joining social media platforms to shill their low-grade reaction videos or porn or other entertainment cruft.
Most of the 60’s era liberation was a matter of being free to create in one’s chosen way, or with one’s desired people. Commodification, OTOH, is about extracting value from lonely people to enrich a vanishingly small minority of platform builders and “content creators”.
Commodification is an extremely alien form of “liberation” when compared with drug legalization or interracial marriage or what have you.
This isn't "juvenoia", I was born in and am living in this generation.
The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths (à la TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.).
If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.
You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.
I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!
Every generation since the history of time in this situation has asked this question themselves and has consistently answered wrong. Nothing good has ever come from a previous generation suppressing a later generation's right to self-determination.
> Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.
It really is just this. Our formative years are when we are young, and human nature is to simply reject what we're not used to.