The phenomenon has gone viral on Twitter.

In the last week, I have watched irreverent TikToks, read impassioned think pieces and waded through arguments on Reddit about the one trend that holds the holy title of fad du jour: the sanctimonious Gen Z stare. If you have blissfully skipped past this clickbait cycle (how?!), let me illustrate.

Older millennials and boomers are revelling in a shared observation: if they attempt small talk with their Gen Z coworkers, they are often met with a vacant, unblinking, frozen stare.

As discourse caught on, people confessed to having similar experiences with digital natives in informal settings like grocery stores, fast food restaurants or even in the neighbourhood walkway.

“They look at you like they just saw a ghost,” one TikToker said while others are comparing the Gen Z stare to young people scrambling for a response or buffering in real time. With the hashtag racking up thousands of posts online, academics and psychologists also began weighing in and – surprise, surprise – after much analysis, the trend was whittled down to the pandemic.

Born between 1997 and 2012, a meaty chunk of Gen Z experienced pivotal, transitional years of high school, university and first jobs behind screens on Zoom.

This coupled with long hours on the internet, the dissolution of third spaces and the lack of IRL interaction has seemingly left us with embarrassingly poor social skills. Hence, if someone catches us off guard with a “hey, how are you?”, we stare back in confusion while debating fright or flight.

However, as a Gen Z culture writer who is usually more than willing to jump on the bandwagon and stratify a micro behaviour as a macro trend, I cannot connect the dots........

© HuffPost