Why Millennials Are so Bad at Posing, According to a TikToker
Millennials are mocked by Gen Z on social media for their cringey poses.
The TikToker Christine Buzan says the way millennials pose has to do with how they grew up.
Tech quickly evolved while millennials were kids, leading to what Buzan calls a "scarcity mindset."
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Millennial posing is lambasted on social media as users mock the early iPhone-era staples like duck lips and the sorority squat.
But while some are holding on tightly to those poses, scared they might go the way of skinny jeans and the side part, a TikToker named Christine Buzan is encouraging fellow millennials to evolve and look inward on why they've been posing this way for decades.
Buzan, who is the author of the online guide "101 Ways to Pose" and has 1.4 million followers on the TikTok handle @LookGoodInPhotos, posted a video in which she went in on her theory that the way millennials take photos and pose for pictures all has to do with their relationship with technology.
"The one thing all millennials have in common — whether you were born in 1981 or 1996 — is that technology changed really rapidly throughout the course of our youth and adolescence," she said, "and this is especially true for photography."
Buzan points out that within a few decades, taking photos went from wind-up cameras to smartphones, and because of that millennials still sometimes have a "scarcity mindset" around taking pictures, as she evidenced with a personal anecdote.
Taking selfies is just part of pop culture — but millennials didn't grow up with the technology. Tomas Rodriguez/Getty Images
"I remember being really young finding a disposable camera and then taking like a million photos of stupid stuff and having my mom flip out," Buzan said. "Back then, film was expensive. It cost money to buy the film, it cost money to buy the camera, it cost money to develop it."
Buzan argues this led to millennials taking photos only on special occasions or trips but also made it so they would take only a few pictures at a time because there were only "so many tries you could have to get it right."
Millennials may be stuck in this era of photography. Jed Share/Kaoru Share/Getty Images
"That scarcity mindset is embedded deep within us," Buzan continued, "and when I say that our brains haven't really caught up to the technology, we're now at a point where we can take photos of anything."
Something, she says, Gen Z knows better than anyone as Gen Zers experiment with poses and angles and don't take it all so seriously.
Her video, which has more than 84,000 likes and more than 900,000 views, resonated with her audience, with many commenters adding that these now-ridiculed poses were considered "safe" when you couldn't see yourself in a screen the way you can today. Others pointed out that millennials were originally shamed by older generations for taking selfies and being so online, which today is laughable considering that's how we all work, date, and relate.
Social media, no matter who you are, has become a societal calling card. Why are we all scared of looking good (or, at the very least, relevant)?
Digital cameras bridged the gap between film roles and smartphones. Aire Images/Getty Images
For me — a millennial myself — Buzan's video hit home. Digital cameras and the first iPhone became a thing when I was in high school. Before then, disposable cameras were a precious commodity, and even after we had this new technology we were still worried about storage capabilities on laptops and smartphones, unable to take photos with abandon.
Buzan's advice has already changed the way I'm looking at my phone and how I take photos, remembering that snapping dozens of pictures of whatever the heck I want is simply not that serious. Take what you like, delete the rest, and post it if you care.
Buzan herself is part of a huge trend on TikTok dedicated toward pointing out the differences between millennials and Gen Zers, whether how they pose or how they act at work. The generational divide may be large, but I for one plan to start taking photos like Gen Z — scarcity mindset be damned.
Source: Insider
