Gen Z has been facing some brutal headlines recently. We wrote about the generation’s ubiquitous deadpan stare and how they were speaking like cavemen on TikTok for a while, both of which hinted at attention-span and socialization issues. No particular surprises there. Then there was the trend of them romanticizing the Millennial generation, after years of calling them cringe. It feels like every day there’s some new challenge Gen Zers are facing (and posting about on TikTok), but Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s recent assertions top them all.
Last month during a Senate hearing on the impact of screen time on children and young adults, Horvath detailed how Gen Z is doing very, very poorly from an academic standpoint. According to the neuroscientist, the generation is performing worse than their parents did at their age.
“They’re the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” Horvath recently told the New York Post. “And to make matters worse, most of these young people are overconfident about how smart they are. The smarter people think they are, the dumber they actually are.”
He added that Gen Z is underperforming across a number of cognitive abilities: basic attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function and general IQ among them. Horvath, who studies standardized testing results across various age groups, attributed these outcomes to Gen Z’s excessive screen time.
Other experts who testified in the hearing urged Congress to take a number of measures to help combat this trend, like “banning artificial intelligence chatbots and companion apps for minors, implementing bans on phones and social media in schools during the school day, and enforcing changes to algorithms designed to keep children engaged,” according to C-SPAN.
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In the thick of Dry January, we look at whether or not Gen Z is as sober of a generation as many people thinkTo be the first generation in modern history to reportedly reverse academic gains is quite a feat, and to hear that Gen Zers are perhaps overconfident in their intelligence, suggesting that many may not be concerned with their test scores, certainly sparks concern. It’s no secret that teachers have been struggling to engage students in this age bracket, but how can a young person focus at their desk when the phone sitting in their back pocket is constantly buzzing with a new viral trend that they’re missing?
As someone who’s in the older demographic of Gen Zers, I’m certainly not above spending way too much time on my phone and obsessing over the latest trends. It’s part of my job after all. But it’s also true that, with the rapid-fire proliferation of trends across young people’s social media feeds, many Gen Z users are starting to sound like this:
The timing of this TikTok series, posted by @carolinecianci, could not have come at a better time. For the past few weeks, Caroline has been posting a series of videos about “the Gen Z girl with no personality” that have repeatedly gone viral. The characterization refers to someone who has adopted phrases and mannerisms from viral social media moments as main parts of her personality and behavior, aiming to ultimately sound like a very trendy and ultra-online person.
In this particular video, Caroline imitates a few phrases that have gained popularity among Gen Z:
- “Ew, she’s being so cringe right now, I can’t look. My secondhand embarrassment. It’s the ADHD.”
- “‘It’s not clocking to you’ is my new vocal stim.”
- “So I asked Chat, ChatGPT, what my resolutions should be ‘cause I didn’t think of any, and he was like, ‘How about you stop asking me the most random questions?’ Like, why did he get my ass?”
- “I fear I ate with that.”
She’s posted a handful of these videos with the same kind of character, all receiving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of likes.
The comments across these videos seem to confirm this fad, and how upsettingly common it is:
- “I call it TikTok personality.”
- “It’s like they’re a soundboard.”
- “People who don’t reciprocate questions in conversation drive me nuts.”
- “The pandemic really did a number on our generations socialization.”
- “And they call millennials insufferable.”
Since seeing this series, I’ve also seen surges in other videos that similarly call out Gen Z’s lack of social skills.
“Gen Z has a really big problem when it comes to being standoffish, odd and overall extremely rude in a lot of social interactions and social settings,” user @groovyrockerchick said in one video. “You don’t have to be besties with everyone, but interacting with each other is normal, and that’s not something that I see Gen Z do a lot. “
“Why do so many people get upset when you try to speak of them if you don’t know them?” @thegrrrlnextdoor said in another video. Many of the comments agreed, including one that reads: “Like why are you nervous to be on the phone? To make an order at the drive thru? To tell the manicurist they’re doing your nails wrong. Like what on earth is goin on???”
If experts are sounding the alarm about Gen Z’s cognitive abilities, and that generation is not only in agreement but adding more deficiencies to the list, what course of action can we take? Is it too late to make a change? Given that the generation’s youngest members are of high school age now, something certainly needs to change soon.
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