Is the generation born between 1997 and 2012 allergic to driving, glued to their headphones, and obsessed with the digital camera revival trend? Photo / Getty Images
There are reasons why phone greetings, uppercase letters and bar tabs are going the way of the dodo. Dad’s old point-and-shoot, on the other hand, is making a comeback.
It’s impossible to pin down the essence of an entire generation. Still, as members of Gen Z, we spend a lot of time thinking about what makes us different from those born before and after us.
Boomers can’t navigate technology. Millennials walk their “doggos” and despise “adulting.” Gen Alpha is doomed. As for Gen X? No one really knows.
Now it’s us sitting in the hot seat, facing bafflement from both sides. Our generation was born between 1997 and 2012, so our oldest might remember the presidency of George W. Bush, while our youngest could’ve grown up reaching for an iPad while at a restaurant. You might know some of us for our unsettling stare or our preference for subtitles. What’s universal is that people outside our generation can’t seem to figure us out.
We’re here to help. The Washington Post managed to scrounge together its Gen Zers for important commentary: a non-exhaustive list of our most defining quirks.
As technology has made it easier to talk to anyone, communication has become increasingly blunt. For better or worse, the phone call is a thing of the past, mostly helpful for talking to family members who struggle with texting. Otherwise, a random call signals a problem. Those surprise calls are necessary for when something so important arrives that a text can’t be sent. When your pocket starts buzzing, there’s one burning question: what’s the issue?
The answer is often nothing. But that moment of panic brings up many possibilities: is someone in the hospital? Did I forget about plans? Am I getting fired/hired? The natural response is to cut to the chase. The “hellos” are replaced with a direct, occasionally curt tone and a no-nonsense response. Those fraying social cues are replaced, even in text messages, with something more immediate. It might seem rude, but today, it’s just the pace of information.
Keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Phone? Check. Headphones? They’re already in.
If you spot us on the subway or at the grocery store or even in the office, chances are we’re listening to something.
“I find I use AirPods a lot at work. I usually have one in. Listening to a podcast makes the time go faster,” said Henry Heyburn, 21, in a voice note to The Post. (Keep scrolling for more on that.) To some, it’s a bad habit – even disrespectful. To others, like Heyburn’s parents, it’s a mild cause for concern, an excuse to avoid social interaction.
But what do we think? Heyburn wonders whether Gen Z’s acclimation to an information-heavy and highly stimulating environment might explain why headphone usage is so ubiquitous: “We’re exposed to so much content these days. It feels weird to have a deficit.”
There was a moment in high school when our generation made the conscious decision to switch from auto-capitalisation to lowercase letters, strictly. Ava Hausle, 22, said her submission to the lowercase lifestyle began in the halls of Malcolm E. Nettingham Middle School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
“I started typing in lowercase in middle school because everyone else around me was doing it, so I thought I might as well join,” Hausle said. “I also saw a lot of people on social media turning off their [auto-cap].”
But why? Hausle believes her peers shunned uppercase letters because texting is known to be an informal act of communication, and auto-caps is the furthest thing from that. Using lowercase letters “gives it a more laid-back tone,” she noted. “I feel like there is something very approachable about it.”
Still, for many, the shift is probably temporary. “I’ve actually recently thought about switching back once I graduate college and progress into adulthood. … I’ll have to adapt to that texting style to make sure I’m not seen as childish,” Hausle said.
Carissa Newick, 22, was never a big fan of phone calls. When she began receiving voice notes on iMessage about a year ago, it was perfect. If something crazy happened, she could just leave a little memo for her friends, in a clear tone full of inflections.
“If I have a story that I want to tell my friends, like something that just happened to me - something funny, something weird, something that made me angry - it’s easier to express it in a voice note,” Newick said. “They can actually hear my voice, rather than just typing it out and trying to use emojis or something to express myself.”
Newick sends voice notes several times a week, with such topics as major life updates or seeing something strange on the highway. The voice note isn’t sent to every contact – for instance, Newick still calls her family members – but the iMessage feature allows for regular, emotive communication with friends. Although it’s easy to think of voice notes as an amateur take on our podcast-saturated landscape, the ability to share steady updates – whether critical or casual – positions this form of communication as the Gen Z voicemail.
Out with the new and in with the … old?
Our generation went through a phase where everyone owned a pastel-coloured Polaroid that instantly printed out photos. We’ve moved on to a less bulky obsession: digital cameras, the ones you can find stuffed in drawers, forgotten about by parents and offered up for use. “Two years ago, my family took me to the Bahamas, and I was planning to buy a camera just for that trip,” said Kife Akinsola, 19. “Then my dad was like, ‘Wait, I have one I haven’t used in over a decade.’”
A 2007 Casio Exilim with 8.1 megapixels now sits firmly in her hand – designating her as “that one person with the camera” among her college friends. Every friend group seemingly has one. It’s an ongoing responsibility: your phone is blown up with texts from your friends, asking you to transfer and upload photos for their scheduled Instagram dumps. You can even find Instagram accounts dedicated to one’s digital camera, filled with photos featuring that specific grain and rawness.
For Akinsola, not having to spend money on a camera where half its appeal is its bad quality was a plus, but what truly drew her in was the emotion attached to each photo. “There’s something so different about the way it captures a moment. It just looks more nostalgic and real than a phone camera,” she said. “It feels like I’m freezing a memory, not just taking a photo.”
In 2024, an op-ed in The Post weighed in on the way Gen Z uses emojis to communicate humour. Most notable might be our stunning rejection of the typical laughing-face emoji. Instead, Gen Z opts for the sobbing emoji. Or the skull emoji. Or the grave. But our generation’s relationship with the digital icons that haunt our keyboards doesn’t end there.
For one, it’s always changing. “It’s so fluid. One emoji can mean one thing, but then a few months later it can have a complete different meaning,” Molly Bloomfield, 18, wrote in a text to The Post. “Like for example, in 2021, they used chair emojis to represent laughing. Where did that come from, it’s just a chair?”
Although there’s no strict or universal emoji etiquette, we try not to overdo it. This rings true for Rhea Nirkondar, 22, who admits that an emoji explosion is a sure way to spot an outsider. “My grandparents, who are new to emojis, will overuse them in a way that my peers tend to not do for fear of being ‘cringey,’” she wrote in a message to The Post.
Our generation is not only drinking less than those who came before us, but we’re also notorious for being those annoying people who close a tab after a one-drink order knowing there’s a chance we could reopen it later. And, yes, probably for just one more drink. Maybe it’s a sign of our lack of commitment, or maybe we just lack the money to care about proper etiquette in a bar. Either way, our aversion to tabs surely can be spotted from a mile away, simply because of our age.
Case in point: one day after work, The Post’s internship cohort went out to a sticky bar in Logan Circle called the Crown & Crow. After the door person checked the IDs of a long line of young people, the stress shifted over to the bartender. After we ordered a round of drinks, the bartender asked us the burning question of the night: “Are you keeping the tab open or closing it?”
All 10 answered “close” except for one. And, yep, we each paid separately via credit card or Apple Pay.
It wasn’t that Brianna Schmidt, 19, didn’t want to learn how to drive. But too many things stood in her way, including access to a practice vehicle. “I know a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, like, you don’t have your licence. That sucks,’” Schmidt said. “Nowadays, there’s so many reasons why somebody wouldn’t. I don’t even think twice about it.”
Zoomers are getting their driver’s licences at far lower rates than previous generations, and the reasons include such things as environmental concerns and the popularity of Uber and other ride-booking companies. For Schmidt, learning to drive was a major source of anxiety. It subsided once she arrived at Michigan State University and became acquainted with the public-transportation system, further delaying the need to get a licence.
The open road has long appealed to overexcited teenagers, but Schmidt thinks that we’re in a different era because of advancements in technology and communication. “We have so much to do just in our homes or with our friends that we don’t feel the need to be like, ‘Oh, I have a car. Let me just go wherever.’”