The Gen Z stare

Has an entire generation abandoned small talk?

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

The girls (generations) are fighting again. —Kate

---

New on ICYMI: Love Island’s history with social media has been plagued by tragedy, and the now USA spinoff is falling into the same traps.

Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶

---

For years, millennials have been roundly lambasted for the somewhat cringey ways they tend to show up online. They have been accused of speaking in “BuzzFeed accents,” and in 2022, some bitch called them out for the “millennial pause.” But while we’ll never be as native to the internet as subsequent generations, that doesn’t mean we don’t have our own superiority to wield. Because while millennials may not be fully socialized online, on TikTok, the new consensus seems to be that Gen Z is not native to real life.

The millennial pause is a clumsy online tic; Gen Zers are being charged with antisocial behavior IRL. It’s called the “The Gen Z stare”: The blank, and in some cases judgemental, look that retail and service workers say they are greeted with when they try to engage younger customers with small talk or simple questions.

I’ve never witnessed this myself, but other people I’ve mentioned the phenomenon to say they know exactly what I’m talking about, and that it’s like watching an actual person buffer the way our videos and downloads used to. The theory is that, after spending their formative interacting with others through screens, Gen Zers bristle at the expectations of ye olde small talk.

@theprincessandthepoppers🫶 #genz #genzstare #millennial

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

@xiandivyne#fyp #xiandivyne

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Those born in late aughts and early 2010s spent a good chunk of their childhood on Zoom, which does not encourage us to display the same visual social cues that we use in real-life conversation to indicate that we’re listening. When most of us talk with others, we’re constantly, reflexively affirming them. We make eye contact, nod our heads, smile or frown. It’s baked into our biology. Or maybe, I guess, was? Our shortened attention spans, “TikTok accent,” new pronouns like “chat,” and now the Gen Z stare suggest technology may be slowly rewiring what used to be our essential humanity.