Author’s Note: This is going to be one of a three-part series I’m calling Lonely Village, a series showing the three most unique signs of generations that grew up in social isolation.

Has anyone heard about the “Gen Z stare?” If you were like me, you probably rolled your eyes and maybe mocked it. Or maybe you chalked it up to people just being tired and having a sense of real existential dread about the way they world is. I know I did both.

But then I read something online that made me realize that I’ve never actually witnessed what the Gen Z Stare really is. I was just imprinting my own behavior onto what people were talking about. The Gen Z Stare isn’t just a bored stare at work.

It’s something far more unsettling, if you’ll believe the Reddit posts.

This is a more upbeat version of it. Let’s look at what people are saying about other experiences.

Oh. Oh dear. That would actually squick me out — and I am on the spectrum. I would feel very unwanted at the cafe and probably wouldn’t return.

This would also probably trigger my rejection reflex and I’d probably wonder what I did wrong. Needless to say, these interactions are very strange, very awkward, and almost give an “alien in a human suit” type of vibe.

And they’re increasingly commonplace in retail.

As someone who grew up in very bizarre, isolated circumstances, I realize I have a lot of quirks. I can be very clingy at first. I don’t know why people react to me a certain way or whether I’m even wanted in social outings. I often need a lot of reassurance just to go out.

The funny thing is that I used to be worse. Far worse. It took me repeatedly forcing myself to socialize, reading up on social skills material, and more to get to where I am now. And I still suck at in-person socializing, from what I’ve seen in terms of results.

I mean, I’m still trying to find a family that actually loves me, but that’s neither here nor there. I can, at the very least, maintain a good conversation if given the opportunity to do so.

While I was still trying to find my forever family and my friends, they just…shut down. They clung to the internet for their friends, many of them getting radicalized in the process.

Some didn’t get radicalized. Rather, they became extremely introverted and socially anxious messes who believed that one bad move meant they were unlovable. Others still just were afraid of others flying off the handle, hearing one bad story too many.

In the past, I remembered people yelling at me for a lot of reasons:

A lot of these things I think got more common by the time Gen Z rolled around. Kids who should have been given extra attention and care were just treated like defective toys, thrown away at the first sign of weird.

At the end of the day, the people who do the Gen Z Stare are the people who were taught that it’s best to say nothing at all rather than ask a question, say you don’t understand, or say you’re hurt.

And now, we’re reaping the rewards of that treatment by seeing them in the workplace — totally unable to have a healthy conversation, unable to do basic tasks like answering a simple question, and unable to tackle problems head-on.

Our society is passive to problems, so we pass the buck to the next person. These people learned that a little too well, but the buck has to stop somewhere, right? Well, we never seemed to get that far ahead, did we?

Woops.

We raised a bunch of people who are literally incapable of socializing, having normal relationships, or even holding a basic job. And now, we’re blaming them because somehow, they “should have done better” when we gave them no tools to succeed.

A lot of people I know on the spectrum are way better at conversing because they were given care, guidance, and lots of reassurance. I’ve been told I’m fairly high-masking too. I wear it with a badge of pride.

I was lucky enough not to have screens in front of me 24/7. Otherwise, I’d be doing the same thing they are. The screens we used to pacify them accidentally “broke their legs” so they can’t even “walk through” the problems. Get my drift?

So they’re stuck thinking about what they should say because they don’t have the tools or training to deal with a social problem in a normal way. It makes them appear like they’re “buffering” or frozen mid-speech.

They’re passive in every sense of the word because they don’t know what to do and don’t have it in them to care to make themselves better. And it’s our fault as previous generations.

Or rather, it emphasizes how much we have to work at actually being the “village” that it takes to raise a child. The fact that the Gen Z Stare has become commonplace is a sign that our society is raising people who can’t survive in a society — even a friendly one.

This is not a parenting thing alone. It takes a village to raise a child well. We need to get people to step up when it comes to explaining things, get more honest about human interactions, and also get more ready to be more accepting of others.

A lot of the Gen Z Stare-ers are people who have a lot of potential. They are just terrified or unable to really speak up for themselves because we’ve abandoned the responsibility of including others in our social exchanges.

We failed them.

So you know what? We need to stop failing them,

The next time you have an interaction like that, try not to get upset or complain. Give them a heads up that you would like them to answer with words, ask them who can they go to for help, or tell them it’s okay not to know the answer.

Sometimes a little push can make a world of difference. The more we encourage them to get involved, the more likely it is that they will become healthy, happy people…and the world needs more of that these days.