The Gen Z Heart Hand is a jokey observation about the way the younger generation forms a heart with their hands as opposed to the old-fashioned millennial way—using just their index and middle fingers, rather than the whole hand.

While older and younger generations are often at odds about things like hair parts and jeans styles, this seems to be a more gentle, funny difference that people can understand about one another with affection instead of disdain. What a relief!

What is the Gen Z heart vs the millennial heart hands?

In 2022, a TikTok shared by user @zoii.tsa pointed out the difference, posting a video survey of people from each generation making the hand heart. They captioned it, “Gen Z vs. millennial.”

The videographer went from worker to worker at a cafe asking people to complete their half of the hand heart after she presented her own. The text overlaid read: “Guess the millennial.”

Gen Z completes the heart using just their index and middle fingers, while millennials use their index fingers and thumbs. It is unfortunate that millennials can’t read context clues and match with the presenter, but they are stuck in their ways. Here she is revealing herself:

On the bright side, a lot of viewers seemed to be won over by the millennial heart hand technique, deciding that Gen Z’s heart hands were “too awkward.” Sometimes the old way is the best way! But let’s see what Gen Alpha comes up with.

More recent half heart discourse

In a TikTok shared this year by @cimorelliband, they went from friend to friend asking them to make both sides of the heart hands in the Gen Z style themselves, then sharing their birthdays.

“Yesss we know lauren is technically a gen z ahahahahahaha but the rest of us are millenials,” they wrote in the comments. It’s cute how hard they’re all concentrating to get it right and in some cases failing.

We’re all just doing our best out here.