This is part 1 of an unfinished conversation in a blog called Unfinished Conversations. How very meta, lol. Here is part 2.
You’re ready to film a video
You open the camera app
Swap to front-facing mode and switch to video
You hit record
You look for the red blink to make sure it’s recording
You quickly make eye contact with the camera
And then start talking.
We do all this surprisingly quickly because we’re a bunch of tech-savvy whiz kids. But according to Gen Z (the people that won’t be caught dead using phrases like ‘tech-savvy whiz kids’) we didn’t do it fast enough.
The fraction of a second pause between we hit record and start talking apparently outs us for being old. How, you ask? It’s called the millennial pause, and I’m here to tell you: they’re right. We do it. And I cannot stop doing it even now that I know about it, which is its own special hell.
What’s the millennial pause?
The very literal pause at the start of your video before you get into whatever it is you were gonna do or say? That’s the millennial pause.
It’s apparently cringe because of the awkward soulless smiling eye contact that comes right before you start talking. The millennial pause is a subtle but silly habit that stems from the days of slow camera phones where we’d give a moment for – is this thing on? – before we began. It’s a behavior we don’t even think about and never noticed because it didn’t matter.
None of this would matter except there’s now an entire generation that doesn’t do the pause: Gen Z. And they noticed. And they made fun of us for it. Which is how we got here.
Did Taylor Swift start the millennial pause?
The millennial pause has been floating around the internet since November 2021. It first began garnering some major traction on TikTok, which I’d love to dive deep into but I cannot because I write this from India where it’s banned here BUT YES, the term millennial pause was first mentioned in a TikTok about Taylor Swift. And while Taylor wasn’t the first person to ‘pause millennially’, a video of her started this conversation.
An observant millennial with the handle @nisipisa stitched a TikTok with T-Swift, pointing out that even she can’t help but become a victim of the millennial pause. “God! Will she ever stop being relatable,” she says, referring to Taylor Swift.
Well, Nisipisa, that depends entirely on which side of 1995 you were born on.
For those of us who aren’t (or cannot) be entrenched in TikTok culture, the millennial pause then got some mainstream attention thanks to the viral article published in The Atlantic by Internet-culture QUEEN Kate Lindsay. (Please do yourself a favor and subscribe to her newsletter on Substack, it’s called Embedded)
By far the most hard-hitting quote in Kate’s article was this:
“The first generation to grow up with social media in the mobile web era, Millennials are now becoming the first generation to subsequently age out of it, stuck parroting the hallmarks of a bygone digital age.”
Ouch.
And although the millennial pause is considered a vestigial behavior since we don’t really need to pause to allow for recording to start because technology has improved, I’d argue that the pause has nothing to do with how speedy technology is, and everything to do with how millennials prefer to be perceived online.
As the Atlantic article about the millennial pause says:
“Although Boomers fell out of the internet zeitgeist, they never had as far to fall as Millennials—the first cohort to watch their youth fade in real-time, with evidence of their growing irrelevance meticulously documented in memes, trends, and headlines published on the very internet they once reigned over. “
TW: This section will hurt 30-year-olds even more than lower backs hurt 30-year-olds.
I’m turning 30 soon, so I’m allowed to say this: we’re aging out of the internet in real-time, and it’s being documented by the very platforms we helped build.
Most millennials sit squarely in the 30 to 40 bracket now. Not old, exactly, but definitely not young. Obviously, this isn’t a revelation. That’s just how the passage of time works but like the article said, millennials are the first demographic to make the not-old-but-no-longer-young transition online.
Think about our relationship with Facebook. It was the first social platform most of us used en masse. We were all over it until our parents showed up, at which point we fled to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr. These platforms evolved with us and were mostly ours until Gen Z got old enough to claim territory. Naturally, they didn’t want to sit at our table, so they moved to TikTok.
Here’s the part that stings: we’re no longer in charge of what’s cool. The mainstream internet, which we once confidently ruled, feels like it’s slipping out of our hands. Instagram, for example, has become a highlight reel of recycled TikTok content. And those TikTok videos, when they finally arrive on our feeds, feel like Trojan Horses stuffed with teenagers calling us cringe.
(I think the only cringe thing is that I can’t seem to stop caring)
Other things that apparently mark us as millennials
In case you were curious what else identifies us as relics, here’s what Gen Z has declared off-limits. Again: don’t shoot the messenger.
- Using gifs as reactions.
- This emoji in any way shape or form: 😂
- Adulting (as a concept and as a word)
- Boomerang videos.
- Cute speak: smol, bae, pupperino, doggo, floof, and the likes
- “I did a thing.”
- “I was today years old.”
- “That’s what he/she said.”
- “Sorry not sorry.”
- “I can’t even.”
- Turning a pizza or coffee obsession into a personality trait. (try and stop me)
- Harry Potter.
- Adulting.
Now if this list makes you mad (especially as a millennial), I ask you to pause (lol) because our quirks aren’t the only ones being dissected online. Without further ado, meet –
The Gen Z shake – it’s literal too.
If the millennial pause was millennials pausing, the Gen Z shake is – well, shaken up Gen Zs.
Coined by TikTok user @homegirlzay, the Gen Z shake is what you see at the start of a video when the person starts recording before they’ve either placed their phone on a flat surface or wherever they’d like to hold it for the duration of the video. So the beginning of the video is shaky.
And that’s the Gen Z shake. Riveting stuff, I know!
Again, Kate Lindsay had a dissection of it in her Substack newsletter called shake,
“Whereas the millennial pause is unintentional—real, even vulnerable—the Gen Z shake is a performance. Both could easily be edited out. The fact that neither are signifies two entirely different relationships with the internet.”
If the millennial pause is giving self-consciousness in front of a camera, the Gen Z shake is supposed to signal the opposite, but the truth is it’s even more performative. It’s deliberate carelessness. A performance of not caring, which is its own kind of trying too hard.
It’s a subtle way of breaking the fourth wall and lets you in with a glimpse of ‘here’s me right before this video was taken’ so you almost feel like you saw something you weren’t supposed to. It’s when you’re so comfortable and aware of being recorded that now, ignoring it is part of the performance.
The entire experience of TikTok is focused on being ‘authentic’, to the point of seeming like you’re accidentally stumbling into someone’s day with Get-Ready-With-Me videos, morning routines, and the like. So rather than pausing for careful consideration, the Gen Z shake is hasty and casual.
It’s been five minutes, are we really still discussing pauses and shakes?
We are. Because as culture mag i-D puts it: “It’s far more insightful to look at generational identities like time capsules. When certain groups experience defining moments together at the same time and roughly the same age, it typically manifests in specific online behaviours. Many of these serve as digital anthropological markers to the prevailing zeitgeist of the time.”
A digital anthropological marker — if we’re going to use that term — is basically just a fancy way of saying: the small things we do online that quietly give us away. Tiny habits that reflect who we are, what era we belong to, and how we move through the internet. So even though things like pausing or a shaky camera might seem too small to notice, people absolutely notice. There’s something oddly charming about these little generational tells.
You can’t really fake them. They’re the kinds of things that just happen. They come from the way we’ve grown up online, and whether we like it or not, they say more than we think.
While millennials had to ‘create’ content in a more thoughtful and deliberate manner, Gen Z is practically used to living the content. Coco Mocoe, a digital culture observer, points out from a Gen Z experience that if every moment of one’s life is up for grabs, they might as well have fun with it. This is Gen Z’s safety net. “The shake is an act of ironic rebellion, where if every moment of your life is up for public consumption, you can simply refuse to take that reality seriously,” she says.
And of course, none of this is new. Generational differences have always been a thing. Every era gets its own “kids these days” moment, and every younger generation has rolled their eyes at the ones before them. Picking apart these habits is just part of the cycle — a way to figure out who we are, by making fun of who we’re not.
Kate Lindsay comments on this, “Like the millennial pause, the Gen Z shake does not “matter.” And yet any time someone notes differences between generations, it is greeted with a weird hostility. The millennial pause doesn’t make millennials lame, and the Gen Z shake doesn’t make Gen Z obnoxious. They’re digital anthropological markers that we’re observing amongst ourselves. Isn’t that what the internet is for?”
So where do we go from here?
I don’t know!!!
A lot of millennials I know have lately been pulling back from social media. Not in some big dramatic exit, just less posting, less caring. Social media in general is noisier now, and it all feels a lot more like theatre. It’s run by professionals, and the performers are professionals.
I think maybe we’re just too tired for it, it starts to feel like work we aren’t being paid for after a while.
Part of why I wanted to write this is because I’m stuck in it myself. I still like being part of internet culture. It’s familiar. I like knowing what’s happening. But there’s this persistent question: am I supposed to keep adapting? Should I pick a style and commit? Or is it time to outgrow the whole thing? I go back and forth, honestly.
If you’re a millennial like me, you can ditch all your internet tics in the hope that some Gen Z punk won’t AT you (this is correct grammar) for being a millennial cliché, but to what end?
We’re at that point where you either laugh at yourself or drive yourself slightly mad. The internet was built by boomers, cleaned up by Gen X, made universal by millennials, and now it’s in the shaky-but-enthusiastic hands of Gen Z.
We all stood on each others’ shoulders to get here, but I’ll admit that being the butt of jokes online is no fun. So if you want to stop doing the millennial pause, or give up on your Harry Potter house, go for it. If you refuse to stop calling your furry child a doggo, more power to you. If you simply don’t want anyone to ever discover that you were born in the 1900s, you have my support.
I keep having to remind myself: my online self matters to me, but it’s still just something I made. A version of me that I’ve built over time, tweaked and reshaped to feel like it fits. And that’s fine. We all do it. But at the end of the day, it is just a version — not the whole thing.
The small habits that give us away will change. New ones will replace them. Those will eventually feel dated too. We’ll keep going, slightly aware of it, slightly oblivious. I think it’s best to just live your life. The real one. None of this matters, and I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Leave a comment