This Person's Perfect Demonstration Of "Gen Z Stare" Is Going Super, Super Viral
The "Gen Z stare" is essentially the blank, vacant look that members of Gen Z often give when they're being asked a question.
You've definitely seen it before, and it looks something like this:
This:
Or this:
People in the comments are pointing out that it's like speaking to a "shy toddler."
"The stare looks like they were just born into the world," one person said.
And this person compared it to staring at a "newborn that just woke up."
People in the comments are blaming the expression on Gen Z's inability to do things in real life.
This person said, "They can't communicate without social media."
And this person blamed it on them growing up on iPads.
The overarching question to the whole thing is: "Why are they so SCARED."
Thoughts?
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Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Time Magazine
The Unspoken Etiquette of Mourning on Social Media
When Molly Levine, 28, lost her father in the summer of 2023, 'life stopped.' Just weeks earlier, she had been dating, posting comedic TikToks, and balancing a high-stress product job at Google with sweaty nights out in New York. Now, she could barely get out of bed. She took leave from work and holed up with her family, surviving on chunks of chocolate babka she'd eat late at night, when everyone had cleared out of the family kitchen. Reading about death, finding meaning in memories, and searching for signs from the other side consumed her days. But another, more frivolous concern gnawed at her. 'After you lose someone, you have to immediately decide whether you're going to be one of those people who posts or not,' Levine says. 'And I know people say, 'There's no right way to grieve,' but on social media—it almost feels like there is.' What do you share? When do you share it? And is it bad if you don't post at all? These were the questions that tormented Levine in the weeks after her father's death. 'It feels silly,' she says. 'You're like, 'Is this what I'm really thinking about?' But you are.' Grief gone viral Jensen Moore, a journalism professor at The University of Oklahoma, studies how people grieve on social media. '[Millennials and Gen Z] post their breakfast. They post themselves on the toilet. They've done everything,' she says. 'So mourning online is just an extension of living their lives online for everyone to see.' Ten days after her father's passing, Levine crafted a 350-word caption to accompany a photo of her father to post on Instagram. Comments and DMs from her community poured in, offering their memories and condolences. But Levine, a social media savvy young millennial, knew the line between sharing and scaring. 'I really refined my message,' she says. 'I was very cognizant of how uncomfortable I could make other people.' As social media reshapes how we share—and grieve—there are many for whom public mourning still feels gauche, even offensive. Vogue editor Chloe Malle notably loathes mourning-by-emoji. 'An Instagram feed is just too public a platform for meaningful mourning,' she wrote in her 2014 essay, 'Why We Should Give Up Public Mourning on Social Media.' Yet, others are crucified for not posting quickly enough—like when 90210 fans attacked Jenny Garth for her silence after Luke Perry's death, or when the internet turned on the Friends cast for waiting days to acknowledge Matthew Perry's passing. In one of her studies, Moore examined how people self-police online grief. 'It used to be, you would never post a picture of someone grieving or a photo of the deceased,' Moore says. 'This generation is posting TikToks of themselves crying.' In 2013, the millennial 'funeral selfie' trend broke the internet, triggering a flood of commentary about the generation's perceived apathy and vanity. Over a decade later and the conversation still hasn't moved beyond moral panic. 'Do I have a photo with them? It's the first thing you think of when someone dies,' says Jay Bulger, a 43-year-old filmmaker from D.C. 'It's a mad scramble to post.' When Kobe Bryant died tragically in 2020, social media became one giant memorial. But mourners were criticized. 'Why are you sobbing online about a basketball player you didn't know?' Moore recalls the pushback. Public grief often reads as strategic—an invitation for sympathy, likes, or cultural proximity. Some call this new wave of mourning content 'performative grief,' says Moore. 'Because those likes can potentially earn you more followers, or in some cases, money.' But for those genuinely trying to express their loss, the online landscape can feel like a minefield: sincere grief is often met with suspicion, judgment, or the assumption that it's all for show. 'I have friends who've been very vocal with their grief, and people didn't know how to handle it,' Levine says. She recalls a conversation with friends, criticizing someone's post for being too raw, too unfiltered. 'People just don't know what to do with grief. We don't know how to talk about it without freaking people out.' Read More: When the Group Chat Replaces the Group There are practical reasons for grieving online, says Pelham Carter, a psychology professor at Birmingham City University. It spreads the word. It offers catharsis and connection. Engaging with a deceased person's profile can help sustain a bond beyond the grave. But every post, photo, or story risks transgressing invisible social landmines of what is and isn't acceptable. 'There are these very nuanced rules that are hard to navigate, because they are unwritten,' Carter explains. 'But you get a feeling for when there's been a breach in etiquette.' For Jack Irv, a 30-year-old actor who grew up in New York City, the entire production of grieving on social media 'feels exhibitionist.' In his early 20s, he was part of the city's graffiti scene, climbing up scaffoldings to spray paint with some of the city's best artists. But 'graffiti writers die all the time,' he says. It was the first time he saw his network mourning publicly. 'You get forced into action,' Irv explains. 'It's like proving who is closer. There's a competitive aspect.' Social media can breed competition and comparison, which extends to online grief, says Moore. 'Who's grieving better, who wrote the best eulogy, who posted the best photo, who was closest,' she says. Irv resents the tone of these posts—'It's like a long rambling story about the time they spilled making pasta together.' It feels cheap, he says, that intimacy gets flattened into a caption. Irv recalls in one instance, an acquaintance who was not especially close to the deceased, became the loudest mourner online. 'It made us all feel strange,' he says. Navigating grief's social hierarchy online can be fraught, Carter says. Posting too soon or too often can give the impression you were closer to the deceased than others believe you were. 'It's bumping yourself higher up in the hierarchy than people feel you should be,' says Carter. 'But it's very hard for us, especially in the throes of grief, to acknowledge that there are different forms of closeness.' Who gets to mourn online? In a 2022 study, Carter and co-author Rachel King found a striking disconnect: participants saw their own grief posts as genuine—but assumed others were just seeking attention. Most cited a 'genuine outpouring of grief' as their reason for posting. Yet they believed others were abusing the process. 'There was a hypocritical side,' Carter says. 'People assumed their grief was sincere—but others' were performative.' In 2019, Jennifer, 30, who asked that TIME not include her real name because of the sensitivity of the circumstance, lost a close friend to suicide. The loss sent shockwaves through her tightknit friend group. 'Privately, there were vulnerable conversations between friends where the grief felt real,' she recalls. 'But online, something shifted.' On Instagram, she says, the mourning felt curated. 'It felt more like perception management than actual grief.' In the weeks after her friend's death, unspoken rules emerged. 'The etiquette was: those closest to the deceased had the right to post, and their posts should be engaged with. If you weren't in the inner circle, the rule was: don't post,' she says. These rules were administered via cold shoulders and whispers. Digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin interviewed young people experiencing the first death of a friend to explore a core question: who gets to grieve, how, and why? She found the tension had less to do with competition between mourners and more to do with how grief was received by the inner circle. The young women in Abidin's study outlined unwritten rules: who gets to grieve first, who gets to grieve more, and what must stay private. Breaches often came down to timing—like posting before a partner or family member. On Facebook memorial pages, they didn't want the first post coming from a random friend. 'There's weight given to your tie to the deceased,' Abidin says. As consumers of the internet, 'we're savvy,' says linguist Korina Giaxoglou, author of A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning. 'Even at our most sincere, we still want our posts to reach and engage—that's what posting is.' But that doesn't make us hypocrites, she adds. 'You can want attention and still be fully present in your grief.' Read More: When TikTok Trends Send Kids to the Emergency Room In Western culture, open grief is often frowned upon, Giaxoglou says. There is an understanding that 'during the bereavement period you shouldn't seek attention.' But in other cultures, grief is communal. In the Asia Pacific region, where Abidin conducts much of her research, grieving loudly and publicly is 'how you show that you're a part of that community.' She says, 'It's not uncommon in some funerals to hire mourners whose jobs are to cry, because the louder the cries, the more it shows how loved this person was.' As younger generations move grief from bedrooms and chatrooms to public profiles, conversations around death are returning to the public square. 'As a community, we need to see these expressions in order to recover,' Giaxoglou says. 'Otherwise, it's like we're hiding our emotions.' A year later, Levine has developed a dark humor about grieving online. 'In some ways, if you don't post about your grief, it's like—did you even care?' she says with a smile. She remembers staring at her Instagram grid, wondering how to follow up a memorial post of her father: 'What's my re-entry going to be? I don't want to signal that I'm over it. I'll be grieving forever.' Years later, Levine is once again making funny videos on TikTok. 'I look back now, and wonder what changed where I was like, 'Okay, now I can post a sunset again.''
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business Insider
'Fawning' is Gen Z's new fight-or-flight response
Meg Josephson grew up as a people-pleaser. Raised in a home she describes as volatile, she remembers monitoring her father's reactions, desperately trying to smooth tensions over. "Being a perfectionist and being kind of always on was very protective for me," Josephson told Business Insider. "It was the one thing in my control to kind of keep my dad's moods at bay." Once she left home, however, she realized that people-pleasing was her default response, even when no one was actually mad at her. It was when she started going to therapy herself that she learned how much she relied on the fawn response to fear — placating instead of entering fight, flight, or freeze. Healing from her fawning inspired her to become a therapist. Now, she said, many of her Gen Z clients and social media followers seem to especially struggle with people-pleasing. "Social media and digital communication have played a huge, huge, huge role in the Gen Z fawn response," Josephson said. Online life magnifies rejection and makes it so much easier to seek validation, meaning Gen Zers with people-pleasing tendencies can get stuck in a never-ending, approval-hunting loop, she said. Josephson titled her upcoming book " Are You Mad at Me?", out August 5, because she hears it so often in everyday conversations. Luckily, being a people-pleaser isn't a fixed trait, she said. Even Gen Zers can shed that identity — if they're willing to let it go. Warpspeed rejection The classic precursor for people-pleasing is if you were If being raised in a dysfunctional environment s or by emotionally immature parents. contributes to people-pleasing behavior, That wouldn't make Gen Zers are not a unique generation. Reactive or abusive parents have existed forever. Still, it's the online world Gen Zers grew up in that primes them to feel abandoned more often, triggering a need for reassurance that their relationships are stable. "There are so many ways to connect now, and because of that, there are so many ways to feel forgotten," Josephson said. While past generations were limited to in-person interactions, letters, or phone calls, Gen Zers can feel validated — or rejected by — so much more. Their best friend not "liking" their Instagram photo. A crush leaving their DM on read. A group of their friends posting a Snapchat without them. This can lead them to fawning, which Josephson considers "almost a more modernized threat response" compared to fight or flight. An unanswered text may not be frightening enough to trigger physically running away, but it can pressure someone to send more clarifying texts in the frantic hope that their friend isn't upset with them. The fawn response, at its core, is "I need this external validation to know that I'm safe," she said. To complicate matters even more, online life is both rife with posts about how people should behave and opportunities to be misunderstood. "We don't hold a lot of room for nuance because we want digestible, short, snappy information," Josephson said. She said one of the first steps to healing is realizing that we're all inundated with high expectations, heightening "this ridiculous standard that we hold ourselves to internally." An endless supply of reassurance Perpetual people-pleasers might fall into a common trap: rampant reassurance-seeking. It can look like texting "Are you mad at me?" to a friend or asking your partner if they're still into the relationship. Validation-seeking can become a cycle because "we're getting this relief for a split second," Josephson said. But done in excess, it can strain relationships, she said. Disorders like relationship OCD, for example, can manifest as constantly needing positive feedback from a romantic partner — an ultimately unsustainable dynamic. Some people ask the group chats to weigh in on their Hinge date, post about their friends in anonymous forums, or even consult ChatGPT. Still, Josephson said that too much outsourcing is a bad idea. AI, in particular, is a dangerous crutch. ChatGPT "does have the intelligence to validate, but because it's not a real relationship with a real person, there's a limitation," Josephson said. The chatbot may empathetically respond with all the reasons your friend probably isn't mad at you, but probably won't tell you that you're asking that question way too often. There are over 140 million TikTok posts about being a people-pleaser. While social media posts can help identify and relate to a problem, they can also nudge people into viewing their people-pleasing as a permanent personality trait. Josephson said that she works with clients to move away from labels that can keep them stuck. "It's not an identity, but rather it's a self-protective pattern," she said. "It's this younger part of you that has learned to be on high alert to manage people's moods as a way to protect you, but that doesn't mean you always need protecting now." One of the best starting points is pausing — putting the phone down or taking a beat in the middle of a heated conversation. A moment of mindfulness, "even if it's just for 10 seconds," can help you acknowledge the fear without immediately reacting to it, Josephson said. "If you're oversharing because you want to feel understood, pause. What do you actually want to say, versus what's coming from a place of fawning?" Done consistently, this practice becomes the stepping stone for other habits, like tolerating discomfort in a conflict or setting boundaries. You might still end that pause in the same place — worrying that you've unknowingly angered someone. The difference is in what you'll do next.
CNBC
29-07-2025
- CNBC
'Where are the instructions?': Gen Zers confront the quarter-life crisis—'the world is messy and hard,' therapist says
For many young people, especially Generation Z, what they were often told would be the greatest years of their lives has turned out to be something entirely different. For starters, America has a huge loneliness problem that is affecting young adults a lot more than older generations. Just 17% of U.S. adults younger than 30 report that they have deep social connections. And the decades-old, U-shaped happiness curve is changing, now that young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 seem to be less happy than people in their 40s and 50s. Twenty-somethings are finishing school, entering the work force and, if they're lucky, moving out of their parents' houses. It's a time where "young people have a tough go of it, the world is messy and hard, and a lot is expected," says Sadie Salazar, therapist and COO of Sage Therapy. Unlike previous generations, Gen Z are confronting significant challenges and frustrations—what many are calling the "quarter-life crisis"—at an unexpectedly early age. "I don't envy Gen Z. Surely every generation that has come before will say, 'I, too, had to transition through the seasons of life,'" says Salazar, who is a Millennial in her 30s. "But the amount of competing factors and stressors that are present for Gen Z folks right now, I personally think is unmatched." CNBC Make It asked Gen Zers between the ages of 25 and 29 about this period in their lives, and what's been the most challenging for them. Here's what they shared. "Where are the instructions?" "I wanna be bill free again." "It's been really difficult to get my career off the ground the way that I want because the job market sucks. On top of just questioning every decision you've ever made, your career is just not going the way you want, love life just in the toilet and just in general, life is not going the way you wanted it to, or as planned." "The mid- to late 20s freaking sucks man. There's no other way to put it. It freaking sucks. I'm just praying that my 30s are a lot better." "It's only difficult because I feel like I'm too old to not have it together. However, my life has just begun. I'm trying to find a [happy] medium. Also, trying to give myself grace." "This sh*t [is] hard bro." "[I] can't find work in my field no matter how many jobs I've applied to (maybe over 100 in the past 3 months). I'm not giving up, but I do feel a lot of weight on my shoulders." While going through a quarter-life crisis, people can experience heavy emotions, says Jasmine Trotter, a 28-year-old Gen Z therapist at Wild Cactus Therapy. During that time period, Trotter and Salazar say people, may: Entering adulthood can pose its own challenges like settling into a career, finding the right partner and moving into your first apartment. This can be more difficult to navigate considering social, economic and political factors, Salazar says. "I would not want to be a Gen Z person in my 20s looking for a job," she adds. To power through quarter-life, Trotter believes you should start by putting less pressure on yourself and avoiding comparison, especially on social media. "Don't compare your bloopers to someone else's highlights," Trotter says. "Everyone's going at the pace that's appropriate for them. There's no need to compare, because you don't know what's going on [with them], but you know what's going on with you." Salazar suggests finding daily practices that help you feel grounded and incorporating them in your life. Whether it's an exercise routine you enjoy or a weekly phone call with a friend, she says, the stability of a consistent ritual can make you feel more in control of your life. "It doesn't have to mean anything fancy or expensive," Salazar says. "Something consistent, usually, helps keep us anchored during a period of life that feels like everything around us is sort of ambiguous and chaotic." Salazar also strongly encourages connecting with a mental health professional like a therapist, who is trained to help you navigate challenges you may face. "One person's quarter-life crisis is not another's. It can really look different depending on what it is that you're managing," she says. "Therapy can be really helpful in that regard, kind of the analysis and insight development. [It] can also be helpful in terms of skill building to be able to manage more specific symptoms that can accompany a quarter-life crisis."
