The world is moving at such a rapid pace, possibly more so than ever before. Even if you do your best to keep up with all the latest technology, social media apps, slang, music, and whatever else, your life experiences will soon be outdated. It’s enough to make anyone feel old.
But while boomers love to point out that they grew up without the internet, and millennials keenly know the pain of realizing there are zoomers who don’t even know who the Spice Girls are, a dad on TikTok has discovered a jarringly simple disconnect between the youngest generation and everyone else that most people had never even thought about.
Daniel Alvarez shared a video this week for “70s, 80s, and 90s babies,” in which he asked his wife and his two kids to do one single task. “Pretend you’re talking on the phone,” he instructed. “What would be your hand gesture?”
The age-old signal for being on the phone, as we all know, is this:
Now, even millennials have had pretty limited landline usage in our lifetimes. Many of us had cellphones by high school (or even middle school, for the 90s kids) and have never owned a landline in our adult life. But this is still, to this day, the signal we use for being on the phone and likely always will be.
But zoomers have even less context for the idea that a phone once involved a slightly curved shape with a bulging speaker at the top and a bulging mouthpiece at the bottom. Or, they’ve seen them in movies, or in the school office, but it’s not their lived experience.
So it turns out the signal for being on the phone, for them, is this:
Mind. Blown.
People in Alvarado’s comments were understandably shook over the discovery.
And there are some other small but astounding differences between zoomers and the rest of us that are already showing up.
If you want to feel, viscerally, the life leaving your body as the new generation creeps forward to take our place in the world, you can watch Alvarez’s TikTok below, and at least be glad you know what “TikTok” is.
@guesswho_718Even the hand gesture game has changed @kamilo.ny @guesswhos_wifey @itz_daniella12 ##LaughPause ##dadsoftiktok ##momsoftiktok ##over30 ##kids ##fyp♬ original sound – guesswho_718