>>481087Your premises are stupid. This is a critique, because you
don't have to rely on stupid premises.
Your "they say" is empty; some people say all kinds of bullshit, not everyone you hear say something represents an entire group of people.
The reason that it's like this, in reality is very simple: the capitalist system results in periodic rolling recessions, the last "great recession" absolutely wrecked the job prospects of a large part of gen y, and the stagnating capitalist system simultaneously demands increased profits and increased consumerism, while the state (capitalists and their political serfs in government) wants workers to be docile and distracted.
The end result, in practice, is an expansion of the
child as a consumer class - everyone is supposed to run around
consuming whatever dumb bullshit, buying
thing, and focusing on simplistic identity issues
forever whether or not they can even really afford to do so. The price of homes skyrockets due to long-term land speculation, and so young adults are encouraged to, instead, focus on accumulating trinkets and knickknacks and focusing their life on that. Children are voracious consumers, and so artificially expanding the "child" identity into 'adolescence' and adulthood to increase the size of that demographic as the population ages serves to increase profits, while also having perceived (but not necessarily legitimate) social value to parents.
The attack on public colleges some years ago led to more-and-more of skill training being monopolized by for-profit universities; academically, there's no reason why you should need to take up a whole bunch of date to be prepared for good work, but economically there is a great incentive to make this so.
This isn't down to some age group having
naughty ideology, it's a broad consequence of a stagnating economic system, and those who regurgitate this in ideology form are, generally, just showing symptoms of the disease.
Ironically, what I'm seeing right now is that a lot of young people are
resisting this tendency; they're taking responsibility for themselves to stop what's been going on, because nobody else is going to do it for them. That's what being a responsible adult should mean, more than anything; citizens who see themselves as culpable for the wrongs of the state and responsible for creating a better society. This is the path to curing all the ills of our country and communities.