A personal field guide to 20-somethings and their thousand-yard stare

A singular look is conquering the world as of now. A gaze so unmistakably of the moment it’s spawned its own TikTok taxonomy: the Gen Z Stare.

In two words with rhymes intended, I’d say: vacant and volcanic. It’s simultaneously empty and erupting, hollow yet on the verge of explosion. It sums up the Gen Z condition: loud in silence, ironic at its core, an unspoken commentary on the absurdity of things.

This isn’t really your garden-variety thousand-yard stare though. It’s more like a laser-sharp blur. An unfocused focus locked onto the conversation unfolding, silently signalling that their interest has quietly checked out, isn’t coming back, or wasn’t even there in the first place.

From the perspective of someone born in ‘02, I see it as a tiny twitch born from living perpetually online yet profoundly disconnected, digitally fluent but emotionally exhausted, unserious yet not, with everything half joke, half weight. It’s the face of a generation raised on pixelated social cues, decoding unspoken codes and hierarchies through screens while the world around us unravels. In our formative years, we’ve seen democracy fray live and grown-ups bickering over climate truths. So yeah, our expression says, “Seriously?” but we don’t snap back because manners (or at least the illusion of them) still stick around anyway.

We grew up plugged into the internet, shaped as critics, commentators, and curators from the jump. From the start, we knew everything was content, everyone was performing, and sincerity was just another aesthetic choice. Truth is, we don’t even blink because this performative reality has been our constant backdrop since day one. The stare captures this hyper-awareness and don’t-care attitude in its own way.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The Gen Z Stare is, to be very poetic, controlled chaos. Dead eyes somehow burn brighter than words for us kids. A face set in neutral, betraying nothing while saying everything. It is the face of someone who has seen too much at 22 (or thinks they have). Beneath that vacant surface lies not emptiness, but compression that leads to disengagement. The stare is the natural emotional efficiency of Gen Z, becoming our filter, our firewall against a world that demands constant engagement.

If I had to lock down the whole vibe in a single word, it’d be “inscrutability”. I’d say that’s the currency Gen Z trades in, in this relentless, hyper-speed, scroll-till-you-drop digital jungle. It’s the ultimate power move for a generation that grew up knowing attention is currency and mystery is luxury. The stare is how we steer through a world that’s always blasting us with too much, too fast, too often. It’s the face we wear when weighing if something’s worthy of our energy, our focus, our guarded emotional bandwidth.

Maybe the wildest thing about the Gen Z stare isn’t how empty it looks, but how full it really is. Behind those seemingly vacant eyes is a generation that’s nihilistic yet hopeful, detached yet wired into every corner of the world, indifferent yet intensely passionate about select causes (and I mean really passionate). These are the kids who’ll doom-scroll apocalyptic climate feeds at 2 AM, then organise mutual aid drives by noon. Who turn their inner chaos into connection, then fight like hell for the world they want to see.