As an early 90’s millennial, I’ve never noticed a “gen z stare” as described in news articles like a “blank face that shows lack of social skill or ability to think”. The only times I’ve witnessed it happen and seen the older person accuse them of “gen z stare” is when the older person says something off hand or dumb but isn’t self aware enough to realize they’re being weird. Hell, I’ve given people a blank face countless times because I was taught it was better to say nothing at all sometimes. Especially when it came to talking to older people at work.
I remember when I was 16, some middle aged guy at work accused me of having no personality. In reality, I kept all conversations short as possible with him (like almost everyone in the store) because they were casually racist and misogynistic.
I feel like I got this at the dentist office with the receptionist once but could bro was the idiot in the situation. Late for an appointment by a little bit, two options seemed to be ask them if there’s still time or schedule a new appointment. All I got was a blank stare instead of seemingly anything reception related.
I’ve had 1 experience with 1 younger employee that encapsulates what is considered to be the “Gen z stare”. She was prolly just bored at working in a beef jerky shop. Not gonna get my ruffles in a feather (I like em crunchy).
Ive worked with younger folk at my work. Half are "oh my lord , we are so screwed " the other half is “damn, this kids smart, I like em”
Soo nothing has changed in the last thousand years.
Forbes has an article from a Ph.D. who claims it’s real.
The ‘Gen Z Stare’: What It Means And Why Employers Can’t Afford To Ignore It
By Bryan Robinson, Ph.D., Senior Contributor. author of Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World: A Guide to Balance.
Jul 16, 2025, 06:43pm EDT Jul 21, 2025, 04:07pm EDT
He was born in 1945 according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_E._Robinson
That puts him in the Silent Generation, as Boomers don’t start until 1946.
Ah yes, an 80 year old definitely has the perspective to understand Gen Z. It’s possible, extremely unlikely, but there are always exceptions, just look at Skyrim Grandma.
Quickest way to tell is to see how they explain a current massive meme like 6-7. If it’s some overly complicated explanation, they clearly have no fucking idea what they’re talking about, degree or not. A degree just means you’re more educated in one specific thing, the higher that degree, the more specific that knowledge. Often that means anything unrelated to that specialization end up lacking. Some of the most educated people I know are the absolute dumbest as soon as it leaves their very specific knowledgebase.
23 skidoo daddy-o
Nothing has ever changed.
6-7 is a combination of absurdism, reference humour, and demand resistance, no?
Some would say even that is an overexplanation, because it’s so generalized and clinical.
The origin is a TikTok video about NBA player LaMelo Ball, and a conversation about his height being 6’ 7" and a lyric from the song “Doot Doot” by Skilla with the same numbers playing over that. Everything surrounding any reference to the numbers in general has spiraled from that, originally trying to get into further TikTok edits.
Here’s a quote from that article
Galvin says the facial expression is a subtle cue from a digital-native generation raised on screens, fast content and online communication. “For many Gen Zers, constant eye contact doesn’t always signal attentiveness the way it might for older colleagues,” he explains. “What a Boomer or Gen X manager may perceive as checked-out might actually be Gen Z’s version of active listening.”
Sujay Saha, president of Cortico-X agrees. “Gen Z entered the workforce in an era defined by screens, social distancing and remote communication, and companies must now close the experience gap with empathy-focused onboarding and support, not judgment,” he told me.
It’s just another distraction from the class war. Anything that tries to divide us is just a distraction.
I’m also an early 90s baby. It used to be you’d say something back when you caught someone staring at you. Like hey take a picture it’ll last longer. Then the one staring would out of the moment, crack a joke back, and be done with it. Now it’s that moment going on too long and the person engaging the stare doesn’t even acknowledge it afterwards. My brother’s girlfriend does it all the time. The other day I’m getting ready to leave and opened my door to go to the bathroom and the girl stopped what she was doing to glare at me. No hello, no good morning, no thought behind those eyes. Just nothing. I put my hands up like I got arrested and she snapped back to what she was doing without acknowledging my existence.
It’s almost as if nobody told them staring is rude. It’s weird. It sucks.
This isn’t that.
What is it then?
Its not when you catch someone looking. It’s when someone stares blankly because what you said is so stupid it doesn’t warrant a response.
Saying “take a picture it would last longer” doesn’t work functionally in this context.
Staring isn’t rude. People are awfully self-conscious. People can just be. Weird is fine.
Maybe it’s a culture thing then. I grew up in a city where I was told if you look at someone the wrong way they’ll beat your ass. I’ve seen it first hand too. You get the wrong person at the wrong time, staring can lead to a fight.
I grew up in a city where I was told if you look at someone the wrong way they’ll beat your ass.
Who’s rude in that situation? Pretty sure anyone who beats people over nothing is a universal dickhead.
The aggressor. Have you never been in a situation where you’re walking down a street and lock eyes with someone and they yell back ‘the fuck you looking at?’ Staring can be so much more than nothing. We’ve spent all our evolution as a species adding meaning to different looks and stares.
The eyes convey so much emotion. You can look at somebody and tell exactly how they’re feeling just by looking at their eyes. That’s the problem with the Gen z stare. There’s nothing behind it. It’s startling when you receive it. My immediate reaction to it is usually ‘is there something wrong here?’ Then to attach a judgment like you’re stupid to it by the person doing it is off-putting.
I do that, I stare and say nothing. Too shy
Gen see, gen do. People adopt each others behaviour.
enculturation
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The process by which an individual adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture in which he or she is immersed.
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The adoption of the behavior patterns of the surrounding culture.
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As an elder millennial, I’ve neither witnessed nor even heard of this “phenomenon.”
It’s quite possible you’ve done it tho.im 41 and never thought about it until I heard about it. My CPU usually resets and just plays jenny talking to Forrest Gump on the bus. “Are you stupid or somethin?” And then I come back to reality and can function again, and respond in a manner that isn’t offensive. If my brain didn’t reset, it would respond with low RAM and i would invariably say something incredibly offensive.
I remember when I was 16, some middle aged guy at work accused me of having no personality. In reality, I kept all conversations short as possible with him (like almost everyone in the store) because they were casually racist and misogynistic.
lol sounds like an asshole to work with. I would have handled it the same way.
My last boss was this way! Horrible way to go about living. I gave as little personal 1-to-1 time as possible. The more time he got from me the more he would slowly hint as his whacko conservative ways.
This guy was insane, we had an employee who came over from China for uni. A few of us are in the lunchroom eating one day then this guy walks in, takes an exaggerated breath in and says “SMELLS LIKE A CHINAMAN IN HERE!” this happened in like 2015. And he has the audacity to think other people are the ones with nothing going through their head.
New girl at work exists.
Asshole: “she’d be hot if she was white and blonde”
Dude, she is hot. And way, way out of your league.
Calling people out should be the norm
Dudes like 55, short, fat, bald and missing teeth and he’s judging a young woman like that? Gtfoh.
My guy was early 70s by the time I left and also fat. He was retired but worked part time, pretty sure it was to creep on young girls. Even the 14-16 year old dishwasher girls would say that he always mentioned their appearance, sometimes while he sat there watching them do dishes as he rubs his gut.
Everytime I was talking to a young lady customer he would walk between us and introduce himself. One day my girlfriend was in with her sister and we were talking, he butts in as usual and the 3 of us gave him the “gen z stare” until he walked away. Just thinking about him makes my blood boil.
Nah, it’s just the natural response to people asking the dumbest shit imaginable while you can’t say anything rude without getting fired.
I’ve seen it a few times. Each time I immediately thought “damn this job must suck” and then later I realized I was the moron customer who asked a dumb question.
The thing is, even if you do ask a dumb question they should treat you with respect, right? And not make you feel bad about it, unless it’s perhaps offensive.
Yes. They work in the store and know all the things. Others do not. It’s literally not their job to know. It may seem dumb when someone doesn’t know something you have learned 100x over. You may even convince yourself that any normal person should figure some thing out easily. But everyone isn’t working in that store thinking about this stuff for 8 hours at a time and we are all busy living our lives. I don’t believe in being a dick to someone because you think their question is dumb. Frankly we are all smart at some things and dumb at others and the rule should be to have some grace with one another about it.
The water cups may indeed be right there dude but excuse the fuck out of me for not spotting them - I just walked into this restaurant and there are a million things to look at in here.
As someone who works in retail, the thing that pisses me off frankly isn’t so much the stupid questions (though yes those are annoying af), it’s the fact that most of the time customers don’t even attempt to figure it out before asking. A question pops into their head and they immediately ask someone. Maybe they should try to use that brain inside of their head before bothering a severely underpaid & overworked retail worker who can barely afford food on the table before asking such an inane question.
Stupid questions don’t bother me as much when I can be assured they who are asking them at least made an attempt to figure it out on their own first.
It also doesn’t help when I’m asked the same question fifteen times in a single shift. (No, I’m not exaggerating.)
Again. You think someone should be able to figure it out with the tiniest effort. But it really may not be so obvious to someone who doesn’t know what you know.
You are not alone here - all people struggle to truly visualize the mind of another person who doesn’t know what they themselves know. Sure you know whatever it is 1000 times over. But the customer does not, and they may have a totally different 1000 things on their mind.
People don’t want to take a guess when they can just ask. If you are in an area where customers can address you, you are there to help them. Why should they stop and guess to spare you effort? It is unreasonable to get pissed off by this.
Stupid questions don’t bother me as much when I can be assured they who are asking them at least made an attempt to figure it out on their own first.
You know, I kinda low-key hate this. I get why it’s your thing because I’ve also worked various retail and service/hospitality jobs, but still. I usually go out of my way to avoid having to talk to employees, but sometimes I don’t have the time, or my pain flares up and I lack mental energy to do that. In especially the latter case, which is getting more frequent, I just ask someone rather than spending 45 minutes looking with pain-glazed eyes that pass right over what I’m looking for. Same thing if I go to huge places I don’t normally go to. It’s absolutely, no question, a gigantic waste of my time to even try to figure it out rather than just ask someone who works there to look up where it is and point for me, 3 minutes tops. They don’t know where it is either, what hope do I have to guess right?
This is one of those “you don’t really know what someone is dealing with/has experience with” things. And it sucks on both ends, but at least from my experience in those roles, it helps to remember that retailers of all types have a nasty habit of changing store layouts periodically with the specific goal of making regular/frequent customers wander around looking for things they used to be able to find, just so they can briefly make more money on impulse purchases. They’ve even done studies to see how often people are willing to tolerate these layout changes so they can maximize it further. Maybe retailers shouldn’t keep forcing customers to use their whole brain (remapping, which will take multiple trips at full brain power. The effort also fatigues a person, which reduces willpower to resist impulse buys) for what should be a minimal-brain activity (routine habits exist to decrease mental load), and you wouldn’t have people who don’t want to further engage their brain just to find the pie crusts that used to be right here, damnit. The frequency with which they do this encourages people to just ask rather than look because it happens so much they’ve learned it’s probably not worth the effort. A form of learned-helplessness.
I can feel the overwhelm set in whenever I walk into a store to discover a changed layout, sometimes months after it happened. Half the time I just leave because I’m not prepared for that much effort, and I have the luxury to do so because I’m the only one impacted. If I had kids to feed or something the entire equation shifts dramatically, and I’d be in there, zombied, asking annoying questions.
Exactly. You are not in your element so even things that seem obvious might not be. It’s very easy to be wrong. And if you do the wrong thing, people will get made at you because “you could have just asked.” Do they really want customers in there all acting on their best guesses? I think that is a fool’s wish. I also don’t get the expectation that I will prioritize sparing the staff a small effort like speaking some info. I’m not taking a shit on the floor and making them clean it up. I’m asking a question. They’re literally paid to help. This is the job. It’s work. This is why they call it working.
Some think that respect needs to be earned. I think everyone deserves courtesy, but I wouldn’t blame someone for this stare when confronted by MAGA-level idiocy/sociopathy/greed.
Remember when you’re mother told you, “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all”? Well gen z kids raise by the kids rasied on that behavior. The second line in this societal meme. They don’t insult but they don’t give fake small talk to cover it. Maybe I’m projecting but i feel the gen z stare is the evolution of that mindset.
That’s a pretty profound theory, I completely see what you’re getting at. To the YouTube video-essay factory with you!
Nah. The “Gen Z stare” is the blank-faced look we give people that we think are idiots. It’s not that we lack self-awareness…it’s you. Gen Z doesn’t tolerate stupid. We just can’t be bothered to call you out on it, because that’s drama we don’t need. So we just stare at you, instead.
Congratulations, you’ve described a common human behavior that humans have been doing for all of human history. 😐
All this nonsense about this or that generation doing something incomprehensible to other generations is just distraction and noise meant to keep us attacking each other instead of coming together against the oligarchy that’s been systematically grinding us down for ever increasing profits.
This is the proverbial scrolled-too-far-down-for-this-comment
My sister in law is a conservative millennial and she does this anytime you mention anything negative about Trump
There are women Trump supporters? My God…
- 45% of women voted for Trump in 2024.
- Those 45-64 mostly voted for Trump.
- 80% of white evangelical women voted for him. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-differences-2024-presidential-vote
The last one makes some sense, since people who call themselves Christians are usually the ones who are least likely to live according to the sermon on the mount, and religiosity requires being dishonest and/or too stupid to distinguish between reality and wishful-thinking fairy tales.
Regardless of how you phrase it, it’s still a lack of social engagement.
Do you think you’re the only generation surrounded by idiots? Most humans have been idiots for all of history. Is just that without digital media you’re forced to live with those people your whole life. Retreating into a digital world for your social and intellectual support isn’t the flex you think it is.
I don’t think you fully appreciate what it’s like to grow up with boomers for parents. Your generation can basically ignore them, without any direct interaction. All you lose, is a birthday card. We grew up with them in our face, every single day. You can’t argue with these people. All you can do, is stare at them like they’re fucking idiots…because they are. Confronting them, is next to impossible, unless you are prepared to go to war over the stupidest shit imaginable.
This isn’t our “social deficiency”. It’s theirs. We grew up with no way of communicating with a generation of Karens, other than deliberate non-engagement.
That’s exactly my experience growing up as a millennial. I think what you (and hater articles) are describing as a gen z thing is normal human behavior when caught in a situation with emotionally unhealthy people, especially if it’s an abusive power imbalance.
Boomers aren’t really the parents of Gen Z if that’s what you’re saying, except on the extremes (the youngest boomers with the oldest Gen Z and they had kids past around 40 years old). That’s mostly Gen X and older millennials who had kids young. I, as a younger millennial, have boomer parents and even they almost aren’t.
~(I typed this and had one of those “god, I don’t care anymore” moments, but it’s typed already so here you go)~
Gen X forgotten again 😭
Stares into the abyss…
Why should someone put up with dickheads who aren’t worth it?
Exactly: society is full of dickheads, then people fuss when they’re treated as who they are like they’re entitled to more.
That’s the “tradition”
We put up with our parents shit so now you get the same shit. But in a more mental health conscious society we understand passing on the shittiness to the next generation is abuse, not a right of passage. Also the whole worldwide lead poisoning from gas thing messed with a lot of peoples brain chemistry (allegedly)
It’s how you end up with sociopaths in powerful positions, noone calls them out on their shit and then one day they have fuck you money then you really won’t say anything unless you feel like mysteriously dying with no follow up investigation
Because society has decided parental rights override teenage autonomy. Runaway and they’ll call the cops, who will return you to them, or if they want to be asses, throw you in juvie. So you maliciously comply while expressing your utter disdain for them until you attain the age of majority, then you abandon them and move on with your life. At that point you become a wage slave, have to live somewhere, and much like Dark Helmet, realize you’re surrounded by assholes.
If it’s not social engagement, then why are you experiencing a particular social signal from it?
A boycott or a strike is political engagement. Deliberately ignoring you is social engament. A blank stare sends a stronger signal than small talk: It means actually engaging with your ideas and judging you for them. Where small talk seeks to neutralize tensions with noncommittal affirmations, a blank stare communicates a boundary clearly and efficiently.
The issue is when people are so self-absorbed they treat everyone like idiots, so the “stare” becomes a default.
If someone says “good morning” and you just stare, you’re not “not tolerating stupid”, you’re rude. You know how much better you can make someone’s day by giving a friendly response? It’ll make your own day better too.
Yes it’s rude, but there are some people who think that insincerity, dishonesty, and wasting time is rude. They’re probably a minority even within Gen Z, and possibly just see the world differently from extraverts.
I’m in my 40s and give dad that look when he lectures me about knowing more than the politicians. He’s been unemployed and supported by my grandparents for most of his life.
In fairness to him, most politicians are both stupid and paid to make bad decisions, so he’s sadly probably still right…
I’m an older millennial and I’ve been doing the gen z stare since the late nineties. I often find the stupidity that spews forth from not just my peers, but what seems all humans, to be disarming to the point of disbelief. That translates to me staring at you blankly for a second. The times i don’t stop and recover for that second results in insults spewing from mine own mouth before my brain can restrain. The pause is for both our sake.
We’re actually giving them a second to tell us they’re just kidding
Exactly, it keeps me from quoting Forrest gump. “You stupid or somethin?”
Only encountered it once maybe two years ago. Was in a part of town I am not often around anymore and dropped in a coffee shop I used to frequent. The staff couldn’t have been much older than 20, all with bare midriffs that I have never seen in food service before (this is kind of a grungy art district spot, but still). Ordered my coffee and asked about their food which used to have some gluten free options, and got a blank stare for maybe 10 seconds.
That’s it. Just once. Not a general stereotype but I’m not exactly well traveled so maybe more regional?
Oh my god leave the poor fuckers alone.
Thank you. stares
As an elder millenial I might have some insight. You know how when we were kids people used to get all up in their feelings when you weren’t smiling. That’s this. “Gen Z stare”, is just “Resting Bitch Face” or “You look prettier when you smile darlin’” repackaged and rebranded. They’re mad that the young people in general and women in particular aren’t running around with goofy forced smiles on their faces to make them feel special.
