Have you been the victim of a gen Z stare? Maybe you have but didn’t realise, because you didn’t know it existed, so let me explain: gen Z, now aged 13 to 28, have apparently adopted a widely deplored stare: blank, expressionless and unnerving. The stare is often deployed in customer service contexts, and many emotions can be read into it, including “boredom, indifference, superiority, judgment or just sheer silliness”, according to Forbes, whose writer described his unease in Starbucks when faced with a “flat, zombie-like look that was difficult to read”.
Hang on, aren’t oversensitive snowflakes supposed to be younger people, not journalists my age? Has a generation ever been so maligned as Z? Probably, but I’m mortified by the mutterings about gen Z, when they are so self-evidently at the pointy end of older people’s poor past (and present) decision-making. They don’t get jobs, homes or a livable planet – but we’re getting huffy about their “rudeness” and “lack of social skills”? Anything short of blending us into their protein shakes seems fair to me at this point.
But I do get it, sort of. Young people have been treating their elders to scornful stares since homo sapiens first gruntingly suggested a “nice walk” to their offspring, and it’s easy to get defensive and lash out. As a “meme scholar” suggested, crushingly, to NPR: “Maybe what we’re witnessing … is some boredom, especially with who they’re interacting with.” That’s exactly what I was afraid of.
But everyone succumbs to the odd vacant stare and it’s not necessarily directed at, or derogatory to, the stare-ee. I’m not qualified to parse gen Z stares (maybe they’re thinking about matcha; maybe they’re actually mewing?), but I can definitely explain some reasons my own people, gen X (aged between 45 and 60), go starey, slack-mouthed and silent – and why it’s almost certainly not about you.
We can’t hear you.
We’re getting a bit deaf but struggling to accept it, so we’re fumbling our way through the world with context clues and inept lip reading. If you say something and we just stare blankly, we’re probably trying to decide whether to deploy one of our catch-all non-committal responses (“mmm”; “right?”) or ask you to repeat yourself. Again.
We suspect one of our idols is standing behind you.
Is that Thom Yorke or your kid’s design-tech teacher? Winona Ryder or some woman you recognise from wild swimming? We need to know.
Something you said triggered a memory of a public information film we saw at primary school.
“Building site”; “railway line”; “fireworks”; “electricity substation”: there are so many trigger words that summon a horrifying mental kaleidoscope of doom.
We’ve just remembered we were too “cool” to top up our pension, ha ha ha, oh God.
Sometimes that realisation hits, mid-conversation, and we need to take a beat to fight the rising tide of panic.
We’ve heard an unusual bird call but it would be rude to use the Merlin app on our phones.
Is that a redstart?
Something weird is happening to one of our teeth.
A filling coming loose, a tooth crumbling, some kind of searing, definitely expensive, pain? Mortality starts in the mouth.
We started thinking about the 19-year-old Reform councillor in Leicestershire who is now responsible for children and family services.
And the 22-year-old one in charge of adult social care who previously said “depression isn’t real”.
Just an ill-defined, increasingly uneasy sensation that we’ve forgotten something important.
An important meeting. Our passwords. The keys. Your name.
You said something we don’t understand.
We get “slay” and “mid” and we hoped we weren’t “delulu” to believe we “understood the assignment”. But you’ve just come out with an expression so baffling, we are simply unable to deduce any meaning from context. Maybe we are going to “crash out”? Just give us a silent, sweaty moment.
You’re watching video on your phone without headphones.
OK, this one is about you and it’s entirely deserved. I use my eyes to try to bore decency into sodcasters; I just wish my eyes were lasers.
We’re existentially spiralling.
Occasionally we just lapse into a thousand-yard stare that semaphores: “Help, reality has become overwhelming; I need to disassociate momentarily.” And who, of any generation, hasn’t felt that this year? Perhaps the blank stare is actually proof there’s more that unites than divides us.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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