Gen Z Declares the Thumbs-Up Emoji Too ‘Passive Aggressive’
This article explores how something as simple as an emoji seemingly harmless to some can carry a completely different meaning for others.
For Baby Boomers and Gen X, deciphering millennials was a challenge, and now it’s Gen Z turn to spark confusion. Like any younger generation, their unique habits and perspectives often leave older generations scratching their heads.
Take the thumbs-up emoji, for example. What many see as an innocuous gesture, some Gen Z individuals perceive as passive-aggressive or even triggering.
A Gen Z employee who recently joined the workforce shared their experience:
“I started an ‘adult job’ where we use Microsoft Teams to communicate. There are only a few emojis available to react to messages, and most colleagues frequently use the thumbs-up emoji.
I don’t use it much. I prefer to ‘heart’ reactions or respond with a quick ‘Great!’ or ‘Thanks!’ (though I feel like I overuse exclamation marks, but that’s another story). Still, the thumbs-up reaction feels unsettling to me. Does anyone else feel this way?”
Others agreed, with one user commenting, “for younger people (I’m 24, for reference), the thumbs-up emoji often comes across as really passive-aggressive.
Another added, it probably feels unsettling because it’s impersonal. Based on your post, you seem like someone who values more genuine interactions.
This generational disconnect highlights how symbols, like emojis, can evolve in meaning and be interpreted differently depending on the context. What do you think about this shift in emoji culture?
Share your thoughts in the comments and pass this along to anyone who might find it interesting!
A premature baby was dying. Her heart rate was dropping every hour. Doctors were running out of options. Then a cleaner smuggled her own cat into the NICU at 2AM. What happened in the next six hours made the entire medical team rewrite what they thought they knew about saving lives.
A premature baby was dying. Her heart rate was dropping every hour. Doctors were running out of options. Then a cleaner smuggled her own cat into the NICU at 2AM. What happened in the next six hours made the entire medical team rewrite what they thought they knew about saving lives.
In a regional hospital in the rural midlands of England, in November of 2022, a baby girl was born fourteen weeks premature. She weighed one pound, nine ounces. She could fit in a grown man's palm.
Her lungs weren't ready. Her heart wasn't stable. She was placed in an incubator on a ventilator with more wires attached to her body than anyone could count without stopping to think about what each one meant.
For the first seventy-two hours, she fought.
Then she started losing.
Her heart rate, which should have been steady between one hundred twenty and one hundred sixty beats per minute, began dropping. Bradycardia episodes — moments where her heart simply slowed down and the monitors screamed — were occurring every forty-five minutes. Then every thirty. Then every twenty.
The medical team did everything. Adjusted medications. Changed ventilator settings. Danger warming protocols. Skin-to-skin contact with her mother, which often stabilizes premature hearts.
Nothing held.
By the fifth night, the episodes were occurring every twelve minutes. The attending physician told the parents to prepare themselves. Not in those words. In the careful, practiced words that doctors use when they need you to understand something without actually saying it.
A night cleaner named Margaret — sixty-one years old, fourteen years working the ward — overheard the conversation through an open door she was mopping near.
She went home at midnight. She came back at 2AM. With her cat.
A huge flame-point Himalayan. Cream body. Orange-red face, ears, and paws. Eleven years old. Seventeen pounds. Named Chief.
Margaret had raised Chief from a kitten. He had a specific quality she had noticed years ago and never told anyone about because it sounded impossible.
He matched breathing.
When Margaret's husband was dying of lung disease in 2019, Chief would lie on his chest during the worst nights and slow his own breathing to match her husband's laboured rhythm. Then — slowly, almost imperceptibly — he would begin breathing slightly deeper. Slightly steadier. And her husband's breathing would follow. As if the cat was leading him back to a pattern his body had forgotten.
Her husband lived eleven months longer than predicted.
Margaret never claimed the cat healed him. She wasn't that kind of person. But she knew what she had seen. And she knew what she was hearing through that open door on the fifth night.
A baby whose heart was forgetting its rhythm.
She wrapped Chief in a surgical towel. She walked past the front desk during shift change — the four-minute window when the corridor was empty. She entered the NICU. She found the incubator.
She couldn't put Chief inside. The incubator was sealed, temperature-controlled, sterile. But she placed him on top. Directly above the baby. On the warm surface of the incubator lid, with only the clear plastic between the cat's body and the infant below.
Chief lay down immediately. He pressed his body flat against the incubator surface. His chest directly above the baby's chest. And he did what Margaret had seen him do a hundred times on her husband's worst nights.
He began breathing. Slowly. Deeply. Steadily.
His seventeen-pound body rose and fell in a rhythm so consistent it looked mechanical. But it wasn't mechanical. It was alive. It was intentional.
The vibration of his purr — measured later by a curious physician at between 25 and 50 Hz — transmitted through the plastic incubator lid directly to the infant below.
Within eleven minutes, the baby's heart rate stabilized.
The bradycardia alarm went silent.
For the first time in thirty-one hours, it went silent.
A nurse discovered Margaret and the cat at 3:15 AM. She didn't call security. She looked at the monitor. Looked at the cat. Looked at Margaret.
Margaret said: "Give her six hours. Please."
The nurse gave her six hours.
During those six hours, the baby experienced zero bradycardia episodes. Zero. After five days of escalating cardiac events that were leading toward a conversation no parent should have to have, the baby's heart held steady for six consecutive hours with a seventeen-pound cat purring on top of her incubator.
The senior physician arrived at 8AM for rounds. He saw the cat. He looked at the overnight data. He looked at Margaret, who was sitting in the corner in her cleaning uniform, waiting to be fired.
He didn't fire her. He pulled up a chair and sat down.
He asked her to bring the cat back that night.
Chief came back every night for twenty-three consecutive nights.
Same routine. Same position. Flat on the incubator. Chest to chest through the plastic. Purring at a frequency the baby could feel in her bones.
The bradycardia episodes reduced to two per day by week two. By week three, they stopped entirely.
The baby was discharged after sixty-seven days. She weighed four pounds, eleven ounces. Her heart was stable. Her lungs were functioning.
She's two years old now. Healthy. Meeting every milestone.
Margaret retired last year. She was given a small ceremony in the staff room. Cake. A card signed by the ward. Standard.
But the physician who had pulled up the chair that morning added something to the card that wasn't standard:
"In thirty years of medicine, I have never seen what I saw on your twenty-three nights. I don't understand it. I don't need to. I just know that a baby is alive because a cleaning lady and her cat decided she should be."
Chief is twelve now. He's slower. His orange-red points have faded slightly. He sleeps most of the day.
But Margaret says he still does it sometimes. When she's unwell. When she's tired. When her breathing gets rough at night.
He climbs onto her chest. Presses down. And breathes for both of them.
