The real reason everyone’s so mad over the Gen Z stare

According to many Zoomers, concerning reports of a “Gen Z stare” may be overblown. If it exists, they say, it’s simply a response to the idiocy of their elders. 

Somehow, though, the concept — recently articulated on TikTok — gained instant recognition from millennials, Gen X, and boomers, who describe it as a blank, if not worried, look as a response to a direct question or interaction. Sometimes, it can be a lack of any greeting or reply from Zoomers in customer service specifically. Further reports point to a potentially related trend, where the group born between 1997 and 2012 don’t say hi when they pick up the phone. 

Any sweeping generational generalization — the millennial “failure to launch,” the Gen X “slacker” mentality, boomers ruining everything — has a way of galvanizing old, would-be foes and bringing them together for a universal tut-tut moment. Now, it’s a new generation’s turn in the barrel, and we’re hearing about their lack of bar tabs, their surprising interest in religion, their tendency to fall for online scams, and their love of baggy pants. Few things unite people as easily as a common point of complaint and judgment. 

But the “stare” dogpile is also a reflection of the social skills we value and how we learned to value them; concerns that go beyond eye contact and active listening. In examining our hangups and the backlash, it becomes clear that the Gen Z stare is actually as much about Zoomers as it is the people who are frustrated by them. 

Does the Gen Z stare exist? 

The most difficult thing about the Gen Z stare is finding Zoomers who will actually admit — on record — to doing it. 

In speaking to a few Gen Z people, the main response I got was that they didn’t believe that they or any of their friends were guilty of committing the Gen Z stare. Sam Delgado, a freelance journalist and former Vox fellow, does not relate to giving what she understands to be “deadpan stare during conversations.” “I was a little confused at first because I hadn’t heard of it before or didn’t immediately understand,” Delgado says. “And while my other Gen Z friends aren’t as chatty as I am, I’ve never seen any of them do this stare.” 

Kat Swank, a young person born in 1997 — the Gen Z cutoff — who says she does not fix upon people with a lightless gaze, was also skeptical. “My TikTok For You Page is certainly telling me that it’s real,” Swank tells Vox. “But I don’t think I’ve ever really encountered it, though.”

Obviously, asking people whether they do an embarrassing thing is not going to elicit a rush of admissions. Psychology experts I spoke to said that while there’s obviously no peer-reviewed research on the origins of the stare or its intent, they believe that at least some Gen Z starers are unaware that they’re doing it. There’s also reason to believe that the way young people look at older people now has plenty in common with past generations.

Michael Poulin, an associate psychology professor at the University at Buffalo researches how people respond to adversity, and says that he’s seen “tons” of Gen Z stares. He’s very familiar with the vacant gaze and felt its heavy void first hand. But he raises the point that part of being a college professor is looking around the room into a sea of young adults who would rather be somewhere else. Since Poulin has been teaching, and perhaps since time immemorial, students, regardless of generation, have given him that blinkless gaze. 

Poulin, who says he’s seen stares from millennial students in the past, raises the point that the Gen Z stare might not be specific to Gen Z but rather a manifestation of the tradition of older adults complaining about the newest, youngest adults. It’s not unlike the way some of our parents told us to look people in the eye and respond to them in full sentences, or the way some of us were reminded not to slouch at the dinner table, or to greet people with firm handshakes. 

Clearly, even in the distant past, some of us weren’t making sufficient eye contact, were being too curt, slumped and ruining our posture, and doling out flimsy shakes to adults around us. 

“To some degree, it’s a comforting myth that all of us who are adults — who’ve gotten beyond the teens and 20s — that we tell ourselves that we were surely better than that,” Poulin says, asserting that older adult complaining about Gen Z probably have a few interactions in their younger years that were also complained about. “This isn’t the first generation to fail” at behaving like a responsive adult. 

Still, Poulin says, “I would be willing to speculate that it may be a little worse for Gen Z,” noting that complaining about Gen Z en masse on social media is a sort of new phenomenon. Bemoaning how annoying young people are used to be kept in smaller social circles like after church or at soccer practices or lunches, but now it’s all online, documented and magnified with the possibility of going viral. That’s probably an issue millennials, at least, can relate to. 

The Gen Z stare isn’t totally made up

One of the reasons why Gen Z might not be totally aware of their stare might be the same reason older generations are so sensitive to it: an unavoidable difference in number and types of human interactions.

Older adults have years or even decades of social experiences, most of which notably came before the pandemic lockdowns cut us off from one another and changed how we interact. Many also remember a pre-internet age of interaction, another sea change in the way that people relate to one another. For millennials and older, having learned the social skills to navigate a wider variety of in-person dealings, it can feel abrupt, even jarring, to encounter someone without them. 

While it’s true that possibly every generation possesses social behavior that, in some way or another, irked previous ones, there may be factors at play as to why Gen Z’s has manifested itself in a vacant glance. It all comes back to those two big shifts: the internet and the pandemic.

“It’s sort of almost as though they’re looking at me as though they’re watching a TV show,” says Tara Well, a professor at Barnard College. Well’s research is primarily in social perception, cognition, and self-awareness. Like Poulin, she has seen the Gen Z stare coming from some of her students. 

If your social interactions are largely dependent on scrolling through an endless amount of faces or staring into a lens, it might affect the way you interact with humans face-to-face.

Well explained to me that the stare has made her think about the idea of “self-objectification” a concept in psychology where people see themselves as an object or solely by their physical appearances, and begin to see other people as objects and images. 

“We don’t see them as dynamic people who are interacting with us, who are full of thoughts and emotions and living, breathing people,” Well tells Vox. “If you see people as just ideas or images, you look at them like you’re paging through an old magazine or scrolling on your phone.”

It’s not difficult to see a connection between social media and self-objectification. 

If your social interactions are largely dependent on scrolling through an endless amount of faces or staring into a lens, it might affect the way you interact with humans face-to-face. On social media everyone just bleeds into an endless swipe if they haven’t captured your attention. On top of that, Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with fully built out iterations of Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. They also have largely experienced so many customer-facing interactions — ordering a pizza, speaking to customer service rep, buying movie tickets — as automated. 

Of course, technological developments weren’t the only thing happening during Gen Zers’ time in high school and college. Many were also navigating those crucial years for social development during the pandemic, when life and school was shut down and held virtually.

Swank, the millennial-Gen Z cusper, said that during her high school years, she had full access to Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram (“the old Instagram where you’re putting the worst photo you’ve ever seen of yourself with a sepia filter”). At the time, she didn’t yet have TikTok and those social media platforms hadn’t unspooled their now-sophisticated algorithms into the apps. But her younger peers did. 

As a zillennial, she suspects she avoided the worst: access to TikTok combined with the pandemic. All that and “your social life is all fully all online? I can only kind of imagine, like, where your social skills kind of go from there,” Swank says. “Online, you can just stop engaging with someone, and you don’t need to talk to them — I can totally see that bleeding into real life.”

While many of us had our social lives affected by lockdowns (and all have access to social media), Gen Z is the only generation who didn’t get to experience what adult social life felt like before it. 

Why the Gen Z stare is so off-putting

Part of what Well studies is how humans react to each other. She looks into the small things, like how we modulate our voice when we talk to someone or how we react to small cues — the beginning of a smile, the small raise of an eyebrow, the end of a laugh, etc. These details help us decipher an interaction, to keep a good conversation going or end one that’s run its course. 

The Gen Z stare seems like the antithesis to these things. The person giving the stare may not know or want to reciprocate these cues; they may not have the practice or knowledge to help their conversational partner. At the same time, the person they’re staring at has nothing to work with. That may explain why people may find the stare so irksome, regardless of whether or not the starer’s intention.  

“People interpret it as social rejection,” Poulin, the professor at Buffalo, told me. “There is nothing that, as social beings, humans hate more. There’s nothing that stings more than rejection.” 

If there’s any solace for those feeling the frustration, or for Gen Z tired out of the discourse, it’s that there that younger generation will likely give up its signature stare. 

“Gen Z will grow out of it because people are going to keep having in person interactions,” Poulin says, noting that it might not be at the same rate as older generations who grew up with face-to-face interactions. “They will have more in person interactions, and they will experience consequences of engaging versus not engaging.” 

When they do, older generations will probably find something else to complain about.