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I think it just shifts around. My interest in music is pretty much exactly the same as when I was 18 (which is to say zero) but I'm much more adventurous on food and body art than I was then (I don't expect to make it out of my '30s with inkable space on my back and I ate a raw oyster the other day even though I know I don't like oysters). I don't know if I'm more adventurous with reading. I hardly ever read fiction and when I do it is most often to return to old genres and favorites. But I read non-fiction on a scale I never would have tried when I was young. I'm at least equally adventurous on travel and am much more open to making friends and socializing than when young (though I still have my bad days).
And the story seemed awfully quick to dismiss the psychological element. Particularly for music and body piercing. Much of hte motivation for adolescent behavior is to differentiate yourself from your parents without differentiating yourself from your piers. Once you've done the former, continued change just increases the likelihood of the latter. Growing up I never felt any need to differentiate myself from my parents because I already felt fully differentiated because I was (to be blunt) much more intellectual than them, even at a young age. What I find is that to the degree I want to differntiate myself from my past it is to differentiate myself from what I was like at 20, not what my parents were like when I was 10.
I also wonder also if the original example wasn't based on an anomoly. That kid who was listening to a completely different kind of music every day. That certainly wasn't true of most of the kids I knew. They might go through a couple major phases but for the most part they were in genre ruts of incredible proportions.
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