The Gen-Z Stare has gotten plenty of press and mixed reactions from people who either say they’ve never seen it or they always see it. I was in the former camp, but today I just had my second instance. The first one just had me rolling my eyes, the second one infuriated me for no real reason. So here I am, trying to work it out.
These cases I’ve experienced, aren’t exactly in line with the "stare", I would just generally call them disengagement. In the first instance, I was at a Burger King waiting to order and the one kid there (because understaffing is chronic everywhere) was doing a dozen other things and when he was finally available, he just walked up to the register, punched in a few things, and looked at me. I understood that this was my prompt to begin ordering. It’s probably the closest thing to the stare I’ve gotten, but in most reports, the stare is in response to an initial interaction. This was just a non-existent greeting.
The second example was at McD’s drive thru where I was waiting for food. The kid bringing the food to me was glued to their phone screen, walked up beside my door and just sort of lowered the bag towards me. I took the bag, said thank you, and they just walked away, still staring at their phone screen. A robot would have had more personality. And that’s the one that pissed me off. Maybe I was hangry.
So on the drive home, I thought of rationalities. These are both fast food workers and you know, why should they care one bit about their jobs? Maybe this has come about as the end result of corporate abuse? Maybe this is a chicken and egg thing. Who gave up first – the company stopped treating employees as humans, or employees stopped acting like humans at work? My guess would be that it’s probably companies that started it, but after thinking about the progression of how things used to be to how they are, it didn’t seem to fit that well. The problem is, it shouldn’t matter that they don’t care about their jobs, they don’t care about other people.
Most articles about the Gen-Z stare talk about the stunted social skills that are the result of the pandemic, where everyone had to be locked inside and didn’t have any face-to-face social interaction. That has some weight, but really, we weren’t locked down for years on end. Less than a year, maybe?
Some articles, and these are the ones I’m coming to think have it right, are the ones that say that Gen-Z is disconnected from society because of constant screen interaction. To them, people in real life are no different than people on their screens. They don’t talk to people on their screens, they just consume whatever is happening. In this regard, they’re like NPCs – non-player characters – just going through life experiencing what life has to offer whenever it’s available. or maybe I have that backwards. Maybe they see everyone else in the world as NPCs. Regardless, it’s like they’re playing some video game. And some of the other behaviors seem to bear this theory out. The lack of understanding of consequences, the lack of empathy. If GenX were the kings of apathy, their offspring are heirs supreme.
Here’s my take. There is a protocol that has to be followed and Gen-Z is not following the protocol. When we developed computers and built them to communicate, we patterned it off of we humans communicate. It’s not hard, it just involves greeting the other computer/person and prompting for a response. These prompts and responses make communication efficient, predictable, and accurate. If a computer connects to another computer and doesn’t get any prompt or any response, that’s a dead connection and the computer disconnects. If you call someone and no one says hello, you assume the line is dead and hang up. And wouldn’t you believe it, there are anecdotal reports of this happening when you call a zoomer.
So, are we living in a simulation? Some of us seem to be.
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