Unfinished Conversations

By Sonia Rebecca Menezes

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This is part 1 of an unfinished conversation in a blog called Unfinished Conversations. How very meta, lol. Here is part 2.

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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.

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.

In fact, none of this would have mattered except there’s now a generation of people that don’t do the millennial pause: Gen Z. I’ll come for them later in this blog, don’t you worry.

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 on whether you’re born on this side of ’95 or the other.

Watch the beginning for Taylor’s millennial pause and the subsequent commentary by Nisipisa

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.”

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’d know. I’m turning 30 soon.

Most millennials find themselves in the 30-40 age bracket, and while that certainly isn’t old, it’s definitely no longer young. And sure, there’s nothing groundbreaking there. 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 of the average millennial’s relationship with Facebook. It was the first mass-used social media platform, and we were all over it until our parents got there. Then the mass exodus of millennials occurred and we moved onto Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, or Twitter. These platforms continued to evolve and were largely ruled by millennials until the next generation became old enough to exist on the internet. And naturally, they didn’t want to sit with us, so they moved to TikTok.

The painful part for me is this: We aren’t the gatekeepers to what’s trendy or cool anymore. The mainstream internet that we once ruled sometimes feels like it has been taken over. Instagram is now just recycled content from TikTok. And TikTok videos on Instagram sometimes feel like a Trojan Horse hiding a bunch of teenagers that call us cringe.

So anyway, in case you were slightly curious about what other stuff identifies us as millennials apart from the pause, here it is. The kids in the Trojan Horse have decided that these millennial internetisms are a no-go in 2023. Please do not 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. I told you I’d come for them so 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 gives self-consciousness in front of a camera, the Gen Z shake is supposed to scream the opposite, but the truth is it’s even more performative. It’s a deliberate carelessness so that the person recording isn’t perceived as ‘trying too hard’ or overthinking it.

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 is something people do online that tells us about their culture and society. It helps us understand how people behave and interact in the digital world. So while banal things like pausing and shaking don’t seem like they’re worth a second thought, people are paying attention to them because there’s an undeniable charm to these deceptively unassuming generational behaviors.

You can’t fake it. It’s who we are, it’s what we do, and it tells a larger story.

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.

Throughout history, the contentious concept of generational differences has sparked lively debates and colorful discussions. Each era goes through its own “kids these days” cycle, where older generations find themselves baffled by the habits of their younger counterparts. This phenomenon isn’t unique to millennials or Gen Z; poking fun at older generations has been a time-honored tradition for young people in search of identity and cultural influence.

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?

Many millennials I know have taken a back seat with their social media, probably because it’s gotten messier, more pointless, and more performative than ever before. The reason I wanted to write about this is because I feel conflicted. As a fan of internet culture, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to evolve, or choose a modus operandi and stick with it. Or should I be outgrowing this whole shtick entirely? I don’t know.

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 reaching a stage where it makes sense to laugh at ourselves, accept where we are, and remember that the world wide web was built by boomers, improved on by Gen X, made universal by millennials, and is now in the shaky but capable 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 have to keep reminding myself: My online identity is important to me, but it’s just a creation. We design them to represent the version of ourselves that we want others to perceive. So while we constantly work at growing and figuring ourselves out, let’s remember that, truly, there are bigger problems in the world.

And when it comes to digital artifacts, generational differences, and online behaviors, it’s all just a shake and a pause away from being totally irrelevant.

Let’s continue the conversation?

• Where do you hang out online?
• Do you find yourself getting less involved on social media because it’s all getting too pointless?
• Should we all just run away and build cabins in the woods?