Sorry, Millennials, You're Guilty Of The "Gen Z Stare" Too

If you are between the ages of 13 and 28, you may be committing a faux pas: the “Gen Z stare” — the tendency to respond to certain bids for interaction with a blank look. The culprit, some millennials say, is a lack of social awareness. If you’ve tried and failed to start a conversation with the intern, or been thoroughly ignored by the teenage Crumbl cashier, you may have witnessed it yourself.

“When you talk to certain members of Gen Z, they just kind of stare at you for five seconds and form a response, and are very not socially equipped,” the millennial cultural commentator known as Tell The Bees said in a July 7 TikTok. “I think Gen Z’s social skills were inevitably atrophied by Covid.”

As a card-carrying member of the generation, I admit that I’m guilty of the stare. While working as a barista and waitress, I’ve awkwardly blinked at customers when I wasn’t caffeinated enough to tell if they said, “Good morning,” or “How’s it going?” But I’ve also been on the receiving end. I’ve seen millennials gape when I broke the news that we’d run out of gluten-free bread. Gen Xers gawked when I asked them if they’d like their latte hot or iced, as if I should’ve had their order memorized.

Some long looks are indeed malicious. My least favorite regular, a boomer with a condescending tone and strong opinions about home fries, silently glared every time I charged him the mandatory card fee. I would stare back blankly because he never tipped.

Every emerging generation becomes the scapegoat for the social anxieties of the time.

Efe Ahworegba, 19, is a content creator who has worked in the food industry. “The Gen Z stare is basically us saying the customer is not always right,” she said in a TikTok with over 3 million likes. With over 500,000 likes, the top comment expands on the translation: “are you deadass.”

Regardless of how you’d phrase that sentiment, it’s a feeling most of us have experienced. Every emerging generation becomes the scapegoat for the social anxieties of the time. Millennials who came of age during the financial crisis — broke due to their alleged avocado toast habit — should understand that.

Born between 1997 and 2012, my cohort is the first to grow up in a heavily digital landscape, sparking worries that we aren’t capable of engaging with the real world. Pandemic-era isolation added more weight to that fear. But being a little bit rude, intentionally or not, transcends generational divides, and dealing with people’s missteps has always been the price of engaging in society.

What’s worse than the occasional interpersonal hiccup is misdiagnosing such faux pas as endemic. As much as saying “please” and “thank you” and “good morning, welcome to Starbucks, what can I get started for you?” is an integral part of the social contract, so is having grace for those who flub their end of the bargain.

Holding the poor manners of a few against all of Gen Z without considering that you might stare, too, is antisocial in its own way. I just won’t call it millennial hypocrisy.