The "Gen Z Stare": An Unconventional View

First hearing of the so-called "Gen Z stare" (this phenomenon actually has its own Wikipedia article) my reaction was dismissive. Adults have always been critical of the courtesy and social skills of those younger than themselves, and the great majority of them quite stupid enough to imagine that these deficiencies are a matter of the current cohort of younger persons being somehow less virtuous than their predecessors. (Because each and every last one of them was a perfect model of proper etiquette in their own youth.) This was all the more the case as the description of the stare sounded so much like the look of disrespectful bewilderment that I suspect people have had to endure ever since the communication of human stupidity in a visually recognizable way began in the remote past.

Yet it seems that the term refers to something more specific. It does not refer to, for example, the offensive response of the ignoramus to a somewhat more educated person's use of a "big word" of the kind that has added greatly to the bitterness of the intelligent and intellectual since time immemorial. Rather it refers to a certain blankness of expression in response to what people of conventional mind regard as the ordinary and even necessary demands of human interaction--the niceties, the lubricants, the "small change" of that interaction--that is apparently indicative of discomfort or disinterest, and perhaps a subtle protest against the demand. The conventional response is to see this as a function of inadequate socialization of "THESE KIDZ TODAY!"

I will not pretend to you that a generation of young people growing up without knowing what it is to not have a screen in front of them providing entertainment is somehow a good thing. Yet one should allow for the situation, like every other, being more complex than what is implied by the lazy "THESE KIDZ TODAY!" reaction, with the fact of the discomfort evident in this a starting point. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that human interaction often is stressful in manifold ways--not least, the "cognitive labor" of figuring out what another person is looking for from them, which is often something they cannot give, all as admitting as much is not always easy given the foolish pretensions they must deal with. Accordingly a great many people do avoid it when they can, with this affirmed by how a person's accessibility to others is inversely related to their power and status. The ordinary office worker may have to sit in an open-plan area, without even the gesture toward privacy that is the low walls of a cubicle. By contrast the boss has their own office, the door to which they feel quite free to lock, all as seeing them means getting past their secretary. The conformist idiot will rush to argue for this insulation from human contacts as a necessity given "how hard they work," but anyone sensitive to how society doles out its perks knows full well that what people get has little if anything to do with their needs as workers or anything else, and everything to do with what they can demand for themselves, with the insulation from contact with other human beings one of those things they are quickest to demand.

The avoidance of human contact here is the more striking because in a highly unequal society--and certainly the unequal setting that is the workplace--as the rules of interaction generally protect those higher up in the hierarchy in such contacts by shifting as much of the stress of the interaction as possible onto those lower in the hierarchy; from those who have position and power onto those who have none (for it is the latter who bear the principal burden of figuring out what this person is looking for as the other party gets to be self-centered and graceless, all as they are in less of a position to say "No" to the unreasonable than the higher-ups). If even with their advantages bosses still want to hide behind a locked door with a secretary acting as guard dog, then how is it for the lower-level workers on whom they can swoop down at any time, and fire for any reason at all (as they cannot afford to forget for even a second if they want to stay employed), and who are obliged to give deference rather than receive it during the interaction? They bear that much more of the burden of interactions--while they are also far less able to protect themselves from the weight of that burden--in a situation which, far from being at all fair, amplifies and accentuates the essential unfairness of the situation which makes the whole thing a demand for "convenient social virtue" backed up by the threat of retaliation for non-compliance. Think, too, of how given the way the world of work is arranged, with those low-level employees often compelled to be the company's point of contact with the broader world, the customer service representatives required to deal with angry customers they have no authority to satisfy as those who made the company policy that caused them to be so angry hide behind those locked doors, and how this leaves them with that much less of the mental and emotional reserves needed for coping with the costs of additional social interaction (especially amid the Great Enshittification making for so many more angry customers dealing with personnel with so much less power to placate them).

Of course, even acknowledging the reality that social interaction has its costs for all concerned, and that these weigh most heavily on those disadvantaged in terms of power and status, there is still the fact that none of this is new. Indeed, three-quarters of a century ago C. Wright Mills wrote of the white collar worker's being obliged to present a smiling face to boss and customer as yet another of the great alienations of labor alongside the four great alienations of the worker already long discussed before him (others' control of the productive act and its product, the way they compete in a battle of all against all to survive, and the way they are required to set aside the whole rest of their human needs, drive potential as they work, machine-like, in line with the employer's precise demands). Of course, that does not in and of itself explain why a new generation should be less intolerant of the demands that their elders bore--and indeed those of conventional mind will rush to the conclusion, again, that they are simply less virtuous than those who came before them, and that this has more than a little to do with the problems of their socialization, giving them a chance to (once again) malign the "lockdown" of the pandemic period (it isn't the pandemic that destroyed so many millions of lives that bothers them, just the ways the attempt to curb it inconvenienced business), and then say something about the time they spend interacting with screens as well. However, they would do well to consider the possibility that those experiences may have left them more questioning of others' taking for granted their acquiescence in their inconvenient and unfair and frankly unnecessary demands, perhaps the more in as they are subject to so many inconvenient, unfair and unnecessary demands in a time in which it seems less and less the case that they are to get very much from living up to the received expectations, entirely in line with the broader tendency to retreat altogether from the society making those demands, their elders' cluelessness about all of which speaks volumes. After all, far from this being a matter of just how the young think and act, and the ways in which their social skills may have been compromised by their technologically intensive upbringings, one would do well to remember that their supposedly wiser and more responsible elders are these days themselves a pack of screen-obsessed wackos themselves with the shriveled social skills to match, such that dealing with them is that much less bearable, and the burden of bearing the unbearable, again, dumped on those younger persons with their own problems whose being raised in front of a screen, by the way, was their elders' doing. In short, it's not them, old farts. It's YOU! You people, the disrespect implicit in the use of the second person plural to address you here entirely intentional because it is entirely deserved. And facing up to that ought to be a prerequisite for shooting one's mouth off about the supposed deficiencies of "the younger generation."