The Gen Z Stare

[00:00:00]The GenZ stare got to be one of the most misunderstood intergenerational phenomena of recent memory. The boomers had rock and roll, GenX had MTV, millennials had the internet boom, GenZ has the existential dread stare of doom.

[00:00:15]It's one of those things that's used in corny jokes along with GenZ slang and just other bad comedy routines that are done often by older people attempting to seem as if they've been chronically online or they're hip to whatever's going on in the subcultures of the internet. Don't get the GenZ stare sucked up. It's very misunderstood.

[00:00:35]First and foremost, it's not funny. It I mean it can be funny, but let's be honest here. It's the equivalent of taking somebody who's going through a rough time and just sort of poking fun at the way they look. Paired with that, it's simultaneously no cause for alarm.

[00:00:50]It's simply GenZ it occupying space the only way they know how. You think about how much screen time a GenZ-er has had from the cradle until now, you you understand it at that point. It's also not mutually exclusive to the zoomer generation. It's just we don't try to hide it. Boomers or millennials might mask their GenZ stare by putting on a fake smile and [ __ ] like that, but GenZ-ers just being honest with you.

[00:01:17]Likely you've earned that GenZ stare by saying something that's just a templated thing that somebody would say or you'd hear on the internet and we already know exactly where your train of thought is going and pretty much the garbage you're using is all part of the script without you knowing it. I'd imagine many boomers getting their prescription to the GenZ stare filled when they're reciting some Facebook knowledge they got off some obscure post that they think they're privy to some sort of information that nobody else is cuz they're more aware than you are. Meanwhile, it's not that your local zoomer is out of touch or even uninterested in the topic you're discussing. It's just that we mainlined all that information in a nine-minute clip on 3x speed that we watched eight different opinions on and then moved on.

[00:02:02]To tell you the truth, in my experience, millennials are guilty of coming across as appearing as though they're privy to some sort of insider exclusive information than most other generations.

[00:02:12]When in reality, the meme is old and you're just out of touch. All this could have been sent in an email. This is a waste of time. Just give us the shorthand reference so we know what page you're on. We can address the topic, then move on to the next thing or just share a silence together and look at our phones. That's right. I'm coming out of the gate in full defense of the Gen Z stare cuz I think it's an unpopular take to actually just try to understand it or explain it. Most of the time people just talk about it like it's oh, this brand new thing and just paraded around that way. It's my main gripe actually when it comes to having these things from the internet trickle down into average everyday speak. It's almost as if we're being educated on them and we can never get to the meat and bones of it until much later. It's likely nine out of 10 other videos that are titled the Gen Z stare will start off educating you about what it is as if you'd never heard of it, which I feel like is often times the wrong approach cuz we've all heard about this [ __ ] on the internet. Why can't we just talk about it? Also, make no mistake, I'm not saying the Gen Z stare is a good thing. It's more of a neutral thing, not even neutral positive or neutral negative, more of a symptom of the times, something to be analyzed as a sociological phenomenon, not disregarded and not ignored. I'll get to my hang-ups on it, criticisms, and just areas where I think the Gen Z stare needs to be improved cuz like I said, it's not necessarily a good or a bad thing. So, I do have mixed feelings about it. But also, I want to say if you are a Gen Z'er, then keep the Gen Z stare in your back pocket as a resource in your toolkit and pull it out when needed to.

[00:03:54]It obviously sometimes you're going to do it without being aware, but it is a resource. Plenty of people out there going to try to give you [ __ ] So, having the Gen Z stare, being able to just pull it out and stonewalling is nothing new at that. So, we're just better at it. Pulling that out and making somebody talk to a brick wall, well, that that sounds like a good thing in my book. Especially if you're encountering an energy vampire like a bureaucrat who just wants to siphon whatever energy you'll give to them.

[00:04:22]See, that's the defense mechanism that Gen Z has developed and it's what you're seeing as the Gen Z stare, but it's really us preserving ourselves. So, put yourself in the Gen Z position. You grew up in a world where it's the attention economy for one. So, everything just wants to take your time away from you.

[00:04:40]You're not going to put on a fake smile.

[00:04:42]You're just going to have a blank expression. Performative happiness and just being nice aggressively is more of a Gen Xer sort of thing, much different than what the Zoomers grew up in. See, along with the digital age came with just x'ing out a lot of that useless office climate culture. Something to keep in mind as well, just cuz you're getting the Gen Z stare doesn't mean that the Zoomer necessarily doesn't like you or even is annoyed with you. It's just their facial expression and pointing it out is really only stirring the pot. It's not making anything better. As a matter of fact, being overly particular about a person's facial expressions saying that the words that they're using doesn't match their emotions and so forth, studying body language openly is pretty annoying and it's an easy way to open yourself up to resentment. As an older Zoomer myself, of course, I can only speak for myself.

[00:05:34]I might be missing a few things. I might have even lost the plot about the Gen Z stare. Those of you who are practitioners of it yourselves will have to speak for your own account of the practice. See, I was an early adopter of the Gen stare, very early adopter as a matter of fact. I was doing it way before it even was called the Gen Z stare. It was just my face. I really kind of have to put some effort into smiling and it doesn't mean I'm not happy. I don't have a problem either. I will smile when it's I feel like smiling and do it naturally, whatever. Frown, of course, all the other things, but just generally when I'm existing, I don't feel inclined to put on a display. It just sort of feels like acting. It takes Actually, let me rephrase. A better way to put it would be I see it as unnecessary effort, especially when you're just a NPC in other people's existence for the most part anyway. So, I'm just in my own head. I'm living in my own thoughts and building dreams in my own mind. That's not to discount the importance of making the best out of social interactions. I'll make conversation with the dude at the bank, for example. My bank teller really likes me. We're on a first name basis. They say hello right when I walk in. However, rest assured that myself and all the service workers who are in the same age bracket as me or just people who are hip in general are well aware that it's nothing personal that when the business is being conducted, whether it just be the computer being click clicked on or just the general goings-on of whatever the happening might be, my face is going to be blank. Perhaps I'll be looking at my phone and it's nothing personal at all. We're just passing the time together. It's high time we make a stand against viewing Gen Z social gestures as being some sort of taboo. They're here to stay. We're just the meta stage of it and the next generation's going to be even more hardcore. Now, of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn't maintain our humanity through the hypnotic gaze and the brainwashing that's going on as we operate the UI of our digital devices.

[00:07:35]These things go hand in hand. You've got to realize the psychic battle that's being waged uh for a person who is living a significant portion of their life in cyberspace, we're dealing with some pretty messed up, relatively new [ __ ] in in the background on our phones.

[00:07:51]Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who's scrolling through social media.

[00:07:56]Honestly, I'm starting to think of that as like going right into the trenches, cuz you're subjecting yourself to so much just attempts at your psyche. You wouldn't criticize a soldier who just got back from World War II for having a thousand-yard stare. It's the same general principle applies to somebody who's just witnessed the vast, unending landscape of cyberspace. The World Wide Web is a mysterious, hypnotic thing, and it's something relatively new as far as the development of the human brain is concerned. So, we all need to just take a step back and have a little understanding of people who are subjected to it. You take your run-of-the-mill Gen Zer, they have a screen time of the average for their age bracket, right? During a just a scroll session that they go through in an average day, they're basically subjecting themselves to the Clockwork Orange Ludovico technique daily. Dread it, run from it, make light of it, it's the reality all the same. It's just the world we live in now. We all got a little Manchurian Candidate in the back of our subconscious that we live with every single day. We live in a day and age that commodifies every social gesture. So, why would it not make sense to just deny the free sample, essentially? I mean, everything is clawing for a reaction from you. So, denying that to the world around you can actually serve to keep you out of a lot of trouble. Take my service worker, for example. Say a raving lunatic customer walks in and is just trying to get a rise out of everybody. Another victim of the modern age fallen prey to whatever rage bait is circulating around the World Wide Web at the time. A Gen stare and just a blank expression that's reactionless will shut that behavior down faster than reacting. I might even be well aware of why this patron is upset. [ __ ] I just listened to a 2-hour podcast of it on my drive over here, but I'm not going to feed into the outrage.

[00:09:55]I'm just going to observe it and then move on. You could almost say that the Gen Z stare is the revival of stoicism in this new updated generational block, and we're running with it whether the old heads agree with it or not. Now, I will say this, if you are legitimately feeling soulless, you're a Gen Z'er yourself, or otherwise somebody who's just overexposed to digital media, perhaps you might want to inject a little humanity into your displays.

[00:10:25]There definitely is something to be said about just the overall into social interactions between people degrading over time, and it is something that should be fought against. You should smile still. Don't overdo the Gen Z stare, by the way. I see it the same as walking around with a big fake smile all the time. You don't want to walk around with a deadpan expression every single day just because that's your personality. There should be a more rounded aspect to a person who's fully realized. A good way to view the blank expression is it's a loading screen.

[00:11:00]While we're waiting for the algorithms to crunch the numbers, we're just putting our face on screensaver mode, and it's nothing to be taken personally by the people around us, and most people know this, by the way. It's a double-edged sword trying to preserve the smile and keep it from becoming antiquated. The last thing you want is some sort of seminar about doing appropriate facial gestures cuz that just doesn't seem like the right path, either. There've been plenty of corporate jobs that report they're having trouble keeping their Gen Z employees engaged and criticizing the Gen Z stare is something that's almost banned in the workplace. I mean, that is Orwellian to think that in the future employees will be required to smile the same way waiters and waitresses, it's kind of just part of their demeanor. It for me, it just feels soulless. Some people are all right with it, but just seems like a weird road. Every time I've had a job throughout my life where a manager or some authority figure walks up to me angry because of my facial expression, I've known that my days at that company were limited. I got to be able to have freedom to look however I want in my face especially. So, if you're a zoomer who uses the Gen Z stare hack day-to-day, just don't overdo it, I suppose, cuz they will find various different ways to patch the glitch and you're not going to like them. Honestly, the fact that they already have a name coined for it, the quote-unquote Gen Z stare, already goes to show you that the jig is up for the most part. I could already imagine just think of some horrible workplace email that goes out.

[00:12:37]The header would be something like the Gen Z stare issue. Here at Megacorp, we're a family and this Gen Z stare thing's got to stop. We want to provide excellent customer service with a smile.

[00:12:50]We understand that for 90% of your day, you're not actually face-to-face with anybody, but a smile can be heard in your voice and it lightens the mood around your co-workers. Also, you want to smile yourself, don't you? Just to feel happy. Then the fine print at the bottom goes on to say that you could be written up for Gen Z staring if a manager catches you doing it three times or something like that. It's just an awful road to go down. But, it's paradoxical. Every time I think about a smiling co-worker who's just got that thing plastered on their face and they had no no other facial expression, I always think of those people as the most miserable people deep down. Meanwhile, the dude who looks stoic and pissed all the time is probably got something really hilarious to say if you can get it out of him, but not everybody's cool enough to see that side of the dude. I suppose my main goal here is just to put words to the concept of labeling every single social gesture and essentially making it a meme. Just allow people to exist for [ __ ] sake. I think that by defending the Gen Z stare, I'm aligning myself with just defending the individual's right to just sit there and do nothing without having it be a social gesture or being confused as one.

[00:14:03]There's another side to it also. When somebody calls another person out on having a Gen Z stare, that person who initially did the call out has some other issues that need to be worked out in their own world. Or at the very least, we need to unpack what the motivation is there. I understand plenty of time it's done in jest. Yeah, it's a meme. It went viral in like 20 25.

[00:14:25]People are just starting now to use the word Gen Z stare, so it's currently funny. But I could easily see it transforming into a doomer bug tick word. Like you're going to use the word Gen Z stare in the context of I looked out at everybody in the room and they were all just Gen Z staring. I'm sure a lot of weird unnecessary implications could arise from diving too much into why the people around you have blank expressions. It there's definitely a lot we could a lot of directions we could go with that. For instance, I'm sure if there's any of you out there who do stand up comedy or just are aspiring stand up comedians, you'll probably encounter just bars full of people with the Gen Z stare on a regular basis, so it's not that new to you. And I'm right there with you. It sucks. People should acknowledge each other and acknowledge each other's existence at least when circumstances arise and it's seems like it's the right thing to do. You shouldn't just Gen Z stare people for no reason. See, there's layers to it.

[00:15:29]There's the deliberate Gen Z stare, which you're want to use and pull out of your pocket with bureaucrats and so forth. Then there's the just placeholder facial expression Gen Z stare, which is just day-to-day. Slightly different than both of those, but very overlapping in a lot of ways is just the overstimulated dopamine drained sort of the hypnotic gaze of somebody who's spent a lot of time online. Think about if you were just spending an entire night up just playing your favorite video game and then somebody comes up to you the next morning while you're just going to get another Monster Energy drink or something and starts judging you for the way you're staring off into the distance. We spend our days going from the little screen to the bigger screen to the medium-size screen back to the small screen and there's obviously going to be some residual effects of all this screen time. When you think about it that way, it does do a good job of explaining why the Gen Z perception of what is cool is often analyzed as being nonchalant. I'd say there is some demons that need to be fleshed out. There's a lot of clockwork that needs to be rearranged. We shouldn't just see being detached as being the thing to be strived for. We should label cool as more of an old-school way of doing it, I think. Now, of course, there's very little you could do to deliberately move the needle in that regard. It's just something I'd like to see, I suppose, as opposed to really any way that it could be moved in its own. More or less, just something to strive for. It'd be cool if we all just were a little bit old-school with the way that we interact with each other. I know this probably won't be applied on a mass scale. Obviously, people are going to be acting more and more like robots as time goes on. But I'll leave you with this. Among your Gen Z friend group, you're going to be thousand-yard staring anyway. So, why not, when you're among yourselves, LARP like it's the '90s, put on a big smile, or just act silly every once in a while, and be a human being. Yeah, I like that for a final thought. Let's strike a balance where we could live in a world where there's a Gen Z stare, and then there's also a very rich human element to just how we interact with each other that exists right alongside it.