What’s the Gen Z Stare? Inside the Interactions Causing Frustration With ‘Whiny Millennials’
Every week, there seems to be a new TikTok debate between each generation, and this time around, the Gen Z stare is the center of almost every conversation. You might have encountered it from everyday life, but once you notice it, you really notice it.
Thousands of TikTokers are showing examples of how the Gen Z stare works. Most videos show a scenario where they encounter a Gen Z customer service worker and are met with what they describe as a “Gen Z stare.” It’s been making the rounds, and it seems more so a universal experience when people like Millennials and Boomers approach these young people.
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What is a Gen Z stare?
The Gen Z stare is when you approach someone from Gen Z (ideally someone in their early twenties) with a simple hello, and they respond with a blank stare as if they don’t know what to say.
Often times, there are two points of view of the Gen Z stare. One from the older generation, and one from Gen Z itself. In a popular video of an example of the Gen Z stare by Mady Lamb, she acts out as a server who deals with a customer who asks if a strawberry banana smoothie has banana in it. The stare that she uses is a substitute for looking baffled at the customer, while also not being outright rude to the person that they’re serving. Some people agreed with her interpretation. “The gen z stare is just us processing stupidity,” one person wrote in the comments.
Other people interpret it as a very loud silence by Gen Z customer service workers who don’t really care about the customers and act rude towards them. TikTok user @talkingtomyphone captioned her video, “Ngl I always leave restaurants when I get the gen z stare of a waiter at the front.”
Either way, this trend has got every single generation riled up about how everyone interacts with each other. One millennial Reddit poster observed that the Gen Z workers at her child’s daycare don’t say hi back to them when they walk into the classroom. “I thought a simple hello or acknowledgement of someone entering a room was just part of having good manners? It leaves me feeling so awkward each time it happens. Is this a new norm or am I just turning into a whiny millennial?”
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Why does Gen Z actually stare like that?
Some people attribute the Gen Z stare to the lack of social skills due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a study from Forbes, 50% of Gen Zers believed that their social skills have declined and 25% of their verbal skills have declined.
Leadership coach Phoebe Gavin told the site that this generation “didn’t get the opportunity to absorb professional norms the way that they normally would have in in-person internships and early career jobs.
She continued, “Because they were working remotely, they weren’t receiving much of the passive social training that we receive by simply being in a space with people who reflect the dominant social and communications norms of that space.”
That’s not to say that all Gen Z people will glare you down whenever you try to encounter them. (Yes, the person who is writing this article is part of Gen Z.) Social skills take time to grow and especially in new environments. And maybe this trend will increase awareness of what’s expected in society versus things that are quite often looked down upon.
Can other generations do the Gen Z stare?
Well technically, they can. Popular TikToker Christian Divyne described the phenomenon as a “universal customer service experience,” and claims that the experience isn’t unique to Gen Z. “Gen Z does that for mandatory small talk,” he says.
Some people in the comments took to say that they had no problem with it. “I’m an older Gen Z and a bartender. When they do the Gen Z stare to me I do it right back and we stand in silence until they eventually talk. It’s like two wizards battling,” one user said.
The act is pretty much compared to the millennial pause, where people of that generation notably take a long pause when starting a video and then goes into what they’re saying. Each generation has its own quirks and it’s inevitable that they’re going to be criticized it.
