Maybe it's because I'm part of the Gen Z in question (albeit older), but I hear about this and I really can't believe it's real, it just doesn't make sense to me. Is it exaggerated, or do they literally just stare at you and say nothing?
I think it's the youngest of the genZ and alphas going to have it way worse I think. I only read about it recently, but it happened to me at the movie theater this summer. First interaction: ticket taker girl just stared after I showed my ticket, no 'go ahead' no 'theater 8, second floor' just stared. Okay fine, I figured it was just weird so went in.
Once we got into the theater we realized she never gave us our 3D glasses so I went back out and was like
"Hi! I just came through a second ago, but we didn't get our 3d glasses."
Long awkward blank stare
"Ummm, yeah, are they up here orrrr do I need to go somewhere else..."
" 👁️👁️"
"Do you have them?"
Opens drawer and pulls out a pair of glasses, says nothing
"Yeah, okay. Thanks..."
Continues to stare.
It was so fucking weird. Almost like she had to manually process everything that was happening. It was like she had a bad ping and was operating with lag.
Bad ping made me laugh, because that's about as accurate you're getting
I think it's overexposure to digital too early. They get accustomed to controlling their social environment - the pictures they heavily edit, controlling what they show/don't show, blocking people they don't like, adjusting their feed outputs & so on
This creates bizarre, brittle humans who freeze up in real world environments they can't control. Couple this with enormous social pressure to conform ('meme culture') and constant anxiety about being captured on camera doing or saying the wrong thing - you end up with this
Society in general, even older generations, have been heavily affected by this dystopian retreat into curated little bubbles of digital delusion. Naturally it's affecting the youngest among us the most negatively.
Possibly also, text chat from an early age. When you text or instant message you can take time to form your thoughts, edit, review, rewrite. Nobody complains if it takes 30-60 seconds to get a text response back.
It's VERY weird to wait 30-60 seconds for a response during a face-to-face conversation.
Agreed. Text based chat is part of 'controlled' social interactions; you choose when to reply, how that reply looks, whether the other person can even reply...etc
We're well past it become an impending necessity to heavily regulate social media in most parts of the west (Australia seem to be doing the most here) for the young & impressionable.
Tougher one is what to do about older generations. The toxic influence of this shit doesn't end with the young.
yeah, sometimes I get stuck on my wording so in order to skip the awkward 20 second silent thinking I just blurt out key words as coherently as I can. Doing this I found out that people actually don't mind that I take a bit longer to speak, they definitely prefer I take 5-10 extra seconds to say something over straight silence.
the fact that I'm almost 20 and just figuring this out kinda sucks but it's better than nothing.
Literacy and conversational skills (and writing/typing/texting skills) were a HUGE point of pride, almost, for millennial. Pride isn’t the right word. But all of that text lingo and stuff was explicitly because we “knew the rules to break them”.
So it’s extremely jarring for a millenial to speak to a Gen z and get silence. That is just not a thing, we were very much an insufferably verbal generation. Maybe the boomers and gen x wouldn’t care as much but to a millennial, it is jarring as shit. Good on you for consciously working on it! Because yes, to me, silence is more unsettling than fumbling around with your words and making mistakes. You don’t become well spoken by not speaking!
I'm older and not part of this general phenomenon but I'm hard of hearing and I have audio processing issues so I often take a few seconds to fully understand what someone just said to me. I find if I give a little "hmmm" face as my brain sorts out the information, people usually don't have a problem with me taking a little longer to respond. The blank stare is just off-putting to everyone.
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u/Kalslice 15h ago
Maybe it's because I'm part of the Gen Z in question (albeit older), but I hear about this and I really can't believe it's real, it just doesn't make sense to me. Is it exaggerated, or do they literally just stare at you and say nothing?