There are a couple of things that have changed recently that likely contribute to these trends you mentioned.

First, technology and how much it has connected humanity. Consider a woman living in a small tribe or village. If she is slightly above average in attractivity, the men living close to her will notice and value her for it. Now, thanks to the internet, every man can easily seek out and find the most conventionally pretty women on earth and spend all day binging on their looks in one way or another (e.g. porn.) When you're used to such incredible beauty, why care about that woman anymore? The baseline of what constitutes "attractive" has changed. On top of that, there are way more women just as pretty as her to be found. In other words, connectivity has increased competition. Attractivity is just one example of many. With basically the entire world to compete with, people seek more and more outrageous ways to stand out.

Second, thanks to the rising standards of our quality of life and the absolutely unprecedented amounts of media at our disposal, consumption has become ever more important in our lives. Before the internet and its Facebook timelines and Reddit frontpages and Tumblr dashboards, before Netflix and TV channels and radio, people would feel bored a lot more often than they do now. That boredom was often the reason why people would start doing things that would have interesting results, like learning mathematics or reading about history or learning an instrument. Like anything that's interesting, these things take some effort. And why put effort into anything when you could just consume, as usual? So now we have a lot of people who all compete with incredible numbers of other people, but would prefer to do so in ways that take little effort. That's likely one of the reasons why branding and identity have become so important today. It's no longer about what you achieve (something that takes effort, after all) and merely about what you are (something that takes no effort at all.)