What The Gen Z Stare Reveals About A Generation Raised Online

Other details were even subtler—nonverbal. In an early scene introducing characters from two different but parallel worlds: Olivia and Paula, the daughter and best friend of a wealthy family enjoying the spoils of legacy matriarch Nicole Mossbacher, and recently married struggling freelance writer Rachel, who has just married Shane, another descendant of generational wealth. 

Rachel, the millennial self-starter, tries to make conversation with the Zoomer girls of the Mossbacher posse (Olivia and Paula), but she’s met with a vacant-eyed, deadpan stare that says heaps without uttering a word. They size her up, judge her, make power plays, and play mind games with her. It’s the sort of unspoken female intrasexual competition that might escape the radar of a male viewer, but will send women familiar with this experience into a state of post traumatic stress. If you watched this scene, then you’ve been an unwitting participant to the “Gen Z stare.”

What Is the Gen Z Stare?

Exactly what constitutes the Gen Z stare is still up for debate. Some insist it’s nothing but a hold-your-tongue face of disbelief young service workers put on when confronted with bafflingly stupid customer complaints and questions. Others insist it’s a blankness that makes it impossible to discern what they’re thinking or an energy mismatch between prosocial people and the seemingly socially apathetic Zoomers who refuse to engage with you with any sort of earnest attentiveness. Instead, people are met with dead eyes, silence, and ominous, blank expressions. 

People are met with dead eyes, silence, and ominous, blank expressions. 

Some Zoomers admit shamelessly to employing the “Gen Z stare” with intention, wishing to inflict a feeling of unease, shame, embarrassment, or stupidity on their victims, while others deny its existence or challenge its implications altogether. Zoomers who deny the Gen Z stare exists often argue that acknowledging it would imply some kind of moral failure. They insist it’s simply the “dealing with stupid customers” face, but as anyone from older generations who’s done time in hospitality hell knows, that’s not quite it. If it were, it wouldn’t be specific to Gen Z, nor would it show up outside of customer service contexts.

But this stare isn’t location-bound to their shift at Starbucks. It’s employed frequently and diversely, whether they’re employee or customer, or not at work at all. Too many of us have observed the infamous stare in everyday life, outside of worker to customer scenarios for that to cut it. It appears to be a general refusal to react or respond in situations where a response is required or expected—in work, social, and casual contexts. As The Take points out, “a large part of the issue stems from the fact that, in many cases, people aren't actually talking about the same thing. 

They take a stab at defining the Gen Z stare in more specific terms: “[it] seems to come more from a fear of responding or an inability to know how to respond in what seem like pretty basic social situations.” They identify three sides to the problem: avoidance of emotional labor, social anxiety, and a lack of development of real-world social skills—the latter of which is a result of being one-shotted by COVID and excessive screen time. 

Some aspects that are generally agreed upon are that this is a generation-specific behavior, much like the “millenial pause” and that you’ll know it when you see it. The eyes are intense, the mouth isn’t moving, the vibe is off. They meet you with a deadpan expression that’s giving you nothing and makes you question if you’re burdening them with this interaction (even if it’s literally part of their job). 

A significant aspect of their psychology and sociality has been defined by their relationship with technology during their most formative years.

A few things are certainly going on, but they seem to be united by a generalized social apathy characteristic of the Zoomer attitude. Every generation has their own narrative, their generationally defined quirks, experiences, and attitudes. There’s how other generations see them, and how they see themselves. But for Zoomers, a significant aspect of their psychology and sociality has been defined by their relationship with technology during their most formative years. For them, the internet has been a digital third space that has taken the place of social cornerstones that aren’t easily replaceable.

Pandemic Isolation: Stunted Adults Frozen in Time

There has been much speculation over what’s given rise to this phenomena: the empty vessel staring back at you, seemingly with no thoughts. The obvious go-to indictments are the COVID-19 pandemic, which socially stunted younger Zoomers during critical periods of cognitive and social development, robbing them of pivotal in-person life experiences like high school, college, the office, and community in exchange for remote alternatives. The living room, once a location-bound signifier of off-the-clock leisure, is now a multipurpose portal to work and school.

Maybe you were at least surrounded by your family or roommates while housebound, but you were likely robbed of some crucial socialization opportunities during the pandemic. In-person experiences transferred to online. This lasted for longer than many realize—with the most isolating effects of lockdown and remote work and learning stretching well into 2022. Many never returned to the office. Schools replaced in-person lectures and labs for remote learning on Zoom which stretched out in many areas for two whole years. “Learning” was a euphemism for staring at each other awkwardly, saying as little as possible, before re-muting and turning off your webcam.

Masks obscured people’s faces any time you left the house until the universal indoor mask mandate finally ended in April of 2022. The younger you were, the bigger a deal all this was, resulting in developmental delays. The missed milestones, precious socialization windows sabotaged by faces obscured by masks, screens in place of one-on-one interaction, and a deeper immersion into online worlds likewise caused Zoomers to regress. 

Per recent Gallup data, 45% of parents reported the pandemic negatively affected their school-age children's social skills, with 22% reporting ongoing social difficulty. 42% also observed negative impacts on their child's mental health, 21% say these issues still persist. The age cohort most affected appears to be children who were in middle school (grades 6-8) when COVID hit. They've reportedly experienced the most marked negative impacts in social skills, mental health, math, science, and reading.

Do we expect them to emerge from this incredibly abnormal situation during critical periods of development, totally unscathed?

If atomization was bad before, COVID was the final blow to the communal umbilical cord. Society hasn’t been the same since. Savvy solutions developed for temporary problems became permanent due to their convenience and popularity, like no-contact delivery and fully remote work days or online classes. As the eldest of the Zoomer generation, I was a full-fledged 22-year-old when lockdown occurred. I’d graduated high school, been to college, had my 21st birthday party, worked several jobs, been to bars, even traveled across the world. 

But the youngest Zoomers were just eight-years-old when the world came to a stand still. Do we expect them to emerge from this incredibly abnormal situation during critical periods of development, totally unscathed? The school cafeteria, gym class, after school sports, the playground—these are all dress rehearsals for becoming a functioning social adult. But their social arena became digital, and they lost some of the ancient texts of prosocial behavior. 

How Technology Changes Culture & Human Behavior

One of the leading theories behind the stare is that it’s a social buffer, almost like they’re loading in real-time as a result of too much time spent online, where most interactions are mediated by screens and language is distilled into more rudimentary expressions like emojis, texts lacking tone, out of context memes, and relatable videos.

Shaheen Alarakhia, a Canadian Certified Counsellor and the owner of Holistic Healing Counselling in Edmonton, isn’t satisfied with that explanation. She claims this isn't her experience with Gen Z in therapy. “Overall, I find my Gen Z clients capable of conversing in therapy and talking through their issues. I don't think that's what it is. I actually think that this is a bit of ‘lost in translation’ moment—a bit of a cultural divide between generations.” She's observed Gen Z to be very thoughtful of other people's time and energy.

"They're always thinking about how they're impacting other people. So, in customer service roles, I think what that means is when they go up to a customer service person, they don't want to take up a lot of their time so they just jump straight into what they need.” Millennials, on the other hand, are thoughtful in a different way: “They'll make small talk or wait for permission to speak with the customer service agent because they'll just wait to be queued, like ‘Hey, how are you today?’ So, a Millennial walks up to a Gen Z in customer service; waits to be queued. Gen Z on the other hand, is used to people just saying what they need and so waits for the Millennial to say what they need and voila, we have a Gen Z stare.” 

She thinks this all boils down to miscommunication and two generations both trying to be polite in different ways. This take, while certainly not a monolithic explanation, is compelling to me. There is always an unspoken subtext shading our interactions with other people, and if we lack the same subtext, things easily get lost in translation. If you try talking to a French person without first saying “bonjour,” you’ve unknowingly committed a huge social faux pas, and that person now thinks you’re incredibly rude. 

Their “unwarranted” hostility towards you leads you to believe they’re the one who’s being rude. And so the world goes round. The same thing is happening between generations and their relationships with the internet. It's like trying to communicate the subtext of certain memes and emojis to older generations. Try explaining to your Boomer parents why that one cry-laugh emoji is “cringe” and “cheugy” or why minion memes aren’t funny or the AI-generated content slop your mom keeps sending you of dancing kittens is deeply disturbing. 

Culture and technology commentator Jerico likewise argues the theory that Zoomers are “antisocial” is an oversimplification. “Gen Z isn't dumb, they're just different culturally or socially and the reason that is is because technology kind of changed the way we interact with one another and changed the culture of Gen Z way different than other generations before us.” They’re social, he argues, their sociability is just a different beast entirely—taking place mostly online, where many are living a double life.

Recent research conducted by OnePoll surveyed 2000 Americans from all generations and found that 46% of Zoomers admit they have an entirely different online persona than who they are in real life. 31% said their online personas were a secret from their family and 53% say it's easier to share their feelings online rather than in-person. Although nearly half of all respondents said they felt a disconnect between their online and in-person personas, 68% of those respondents were part of Gen Z. Even their real-life friendships are most carefully nurtured through internet-mediated communication. If nearly half of Zoomers are really leading a double life, perhaps they could be sacrificing the real world for who they could be in the virtual world.

Jerico gives countless examples of subtle ways that technology has fundamentally altered the culture and communication. Take phones, for example. Every generation has one, but we use them incredibly differently. Did you know most Zoomers don’t say “hello” when answering the phone? That behavior doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It requires some crucial context. Zoomers were taught not to say hello because of scammers, especially sophisticated scammers that can supposedly record your voice when you answer a call and use those recordings later to scam you. Combine that with modern tech that makes saying hello a bit redundant—the fact that we have caller ID so we know who’s calling, and the prevalence of unsolicited calls from telemarketers makes people uninterested in answering unknown or unexpected calls. Most calls made by Zoomers are probably primed beforehand via texts like “call me?” 

Connecting back to that therapist’s analysis of the Gen Z stare being a miscommunication that results from Zoomers’ attempts to be polite by being efficient and not wasting people’s time, he says, “What is a place that notoriously does that? What is the place that removes all context? What is the place that people try to get to the information as quick as possible? It's the internet. On the internet, we don't like nuance, we don't like context, we want the information or the content as fast as possible.”

Another TikTok creator observed Gen Z isn’t one for small talk or “filler,” instead opting for fast, blunt, and to-the-point communication. “When it comes to customer service, when somebody is asking for an answer that maybe is an older generation, I feel like an underdeveloped Gen Z mindset is, like, ‘I told you the answer. Now, make a decision.’ But with older generations, they want that filler speak and with Gen Z, they're kind of like, I told you the sentence, it's over, so what do you want me to say next? That's kind of the energy.” 

I’m guessing this has to do with the low effort, faceless communication that’s become default between young people. How many of us claim we’re “screaming laughing” at a funny meme when in reality we’ve merely exhaled a little harder through our nose? Too much entrenchment in this sort of communication can carry over into the real world. Small talk now feels performative and purposeless to the generation who avoid interacting with other humans at all costs.

Performing for the Imaginary Audience

Lots of people have noticed that Zoomers are unwilling to do the “emotional labor” of putting on a happy face and maintaining decorum for the sake of professionality when a customer is being foolish or disrespectful, but also seemingly when a customer (or employee) is interacting with them at all. The hesitancy to react seems to be a result of growing up socializing through screens. That’s the simplistic answer. The more complicated answer is that technology influences culture, language, and communication in pretty significant ways. Since Zoomers are the first generation to grow up online, it’s carved out some unique behavioral idiosyncrasies that don’t translate well to in-person communication. 

Zoomers have a hyper-awareness of being perceived and likely a paranoia of being monitored by others. On the one hand, they’re the first generation that has documented their entire childhood online in a meaningful sense, with smartphones in hand from a very young age, and access to social media far too soon. Online call-out culture has meant they can’t make any mistakes along the way. Something you tweeted at 13 will come back to haunt you at 23, potentially risking your worldwide social reputation and employability. 

Visibility on social media during adolescence can also make them targets for online cyberbullying by their peers. Maybe this explains why they’re early adopters of the “gray rock” method. If they don’t make any sudden movements, don’t kick up a big fuss, don’t draw attention—maybe they’ll escape the mob. Maybe their day of judgment won’t come. On the flip side of this hyper awareness is almost a self aggrandizing all-encompassing performance. Like they’re living for an invisible audience that is always watching. Literally internet-induced main character syndrome.

Mary Morgan, of Pop Culture Crisis notes, "they're thinking of what they're going to say over text or over social media about this interaction later on as if they have some kind of audience watching them at all times. They think that they're Jim Halpert in The Office when Michael Scott says something stupid and Jim Halpert looks at the camera, breaks the fourth wall. That's what they think they're doing, as if there's a captive audience watching this interaction.” 

I’ve come across countless comments online expressing the same sentiment—that Zoomers seem to have a voyeur living in their own head rent-free. They have to look cool for their imaginary audience, leading them to essentially aura farm and mog you by hoarding their energy and acting nonchalant. They’re “just a chill guy.” Unreactive. Unresponsive. Unable to be seen being cringe if they never say or do anything at all. Meanwhile, you’re asking them questions or looking for feedback while they give you nothing. 

Morgan also notes the subtle inverse power play at hand here. "They do Gen Z stare when you're nice, too. It literally has nothing to do with the customer's behavior. They meet you with this blank stare regardless and they're acting like it's some small form of retaliatory protest against the system or older people who they perceive to be privileged over them.” 

Just as technology changes culture and behavior, it also changes attitudes. And what’s the prevailing attitude online? A deeply entrenched ageism, firstly. When older people have a “cringe” take, they’re dismissed as cringe, cheugy, and out of touch. “Okay, Boomer” or “Millenial cringe” comes to mind. Online social etiquette is also deeply antisocial, normalizing behaviors like aggression, harassment, snark, and disrespect (shout out to Jerico for raising this point in a since deleted video). 

So, online, where Zoomers spend the majority of their time and where they learn to relate to others, outright preferring it to real-life social interaction, they’re surrounded by clap back culture and an environment where being disrespectful and snarky and making fun of other people is normal behavior. All of this is done from behind a screen, where we can’t see the person’s actual facial expressions.

How Much Worse Will This Get?

I’d argue the bleeding out of internet culture onto the broader culture is fundamentally changing the previously deeply ingrained American corporate ethos of “the customer is always right” to a worker dignity ethos that we see in other places in the western world, like Australia, or Europe.

If this much rewiring happened in a single smartphone generation, what happens when Gen Alpha grows up in a world of AI companions, deepfakes, and augmented realities?

This accounts for the minority of Zoomers who exhibit low level contempt for customers and delight in making them uncomfortable. As for the rest? Their real-life communication skills may have just atrophied from under-use. Their mind is elsewhere, they’re not sure how to respond, and they’re a risk-averse, conflict-avoidant generation, so they just freeze. They freeze when you complain, when you inquire, and when you make nice. 

If this much rewiring happened in a single smartphone generation, what happens when Gen Alpha grows up in a world of AI companions, deepfakes, and augmented realities? If even casual eye contact now feels like a burden, we’re looking at a future where basic human connection is the anomaly, not the baseline.