How I dismantled my kids’ enjoyment of the ‘6-7’ phenomenon
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
I often pity my kids. They have a lot to deal with that I didn’t when I was their age, including all the typical doom-and-gloom we talk about: the climate crisis, extreme economic inequality, the cesspit of the internet, impending AI-ification of everything, and the wholesale dismantling (literally and figuratively) of our civic life and institutions by the MAGA movement.
Another thing I didn’t have to deal with was having me as a parent. This manifests in a number of ways, but was most recently illustrated when my kids and I started talking about the “6-7” meme.
If you’re a parent — or even just an adult human — and don’t know what I’m talking about, you should count yourself among the fortunate and stop reading. If you want to be culturally aware, the roughest explanation is that “6-7” is a phrase that Gen Alpha and young Gen Z employ whenever a reference to the numbers “six” and “seven” comes up. They say it out loud and move their hands up and down in a “so-so” type of motion.
My 10-year-old daughter informs me that this phenomenon has been around at least since the beginning of the year (and apparently stems from a song by Skrilla and went viral on TikTok), but it appears only to have risen to broad cultural awareness in the past few weeks. In that time, dozens of media outlets have published seemingly serious, head-scratching articles trying to explain what “6-7” is all about. From The New York Post to NPR to the most recent episode of South Park, there’s a booming cottage industry in think-pieces on the subject, with the gist of them all being: “Adults don’t know what it means and we don’t like it.”
Maybe my favorite headline comes from The Washington Post: “Why kids keep saying ‘6-7’: ‘It’s really beautiful because it’s dumb.’”
Anyway, my kids and I were talking about “6-7” during our morning drive to school the other day, when we always take a few extra minutes to idle in the Memorial Field parking lot for a bit of banter while looking at the lake.
“Do you know what it means?” they asked me, with a tinge of subversive glee.
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“But what does it mean,” they responded, obviously trying to bait me.
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, and that’s the point, right?”
“Yeah… but… do you know what it means?”
That was the point at which I began to pity my kids, as I launched into a disquisition on the late-anthropologist and ethnologist Clifford Geertz, whose book The Interpretation of Cultures focused on identifying the substructural elements of society that create social meaning and therefore “culture.”
In the chapter “Thick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture,” Geertz wrote of the difference between a “wink” and a “twitch” as emblematic of “subjective” and “objective” actions, respectively, with the former representing a symbolic gesture with meaning, and the latter a physical gesture that carries no cultural resonance.
As he wrote on the sixth and seventh pages of the chapter (coincidence?), “Culture is public because meaning is. You can’t wink (or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as winking …,” and, “[C]ulture consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and join them …”
I gave the kids the shorthand version of all that, insofar as symbolic actions have cultural significance if performed in public and are understood both by the individuals who perform them and those who perceive them. As I told them, Geertz went on to theorize that the accumulation of these actions forms “webs of significance,” which are knowable and therefore powerful only to those who are part of the in-group. To outsiders, those symbolic actions and the webs of significance they create are at best indecipherable and therefore the culture they represent is closed to them.
“Yeah, ‘6-7’ doesn’t mean anything, but because of that it can mean anything — but only to the people who ‘get it,’” I said. “You guys say ‘6-7’ because adults don’t get it (and can’t get it), so you create your own culture and assert power over the dominant group, which is your teachers and parents. That’s why it’s fun, right?”
“I guess you get it,” my daughter said, though with a hint of disappointment.
And that’s how I made “6-7” uncool, though I have to say I was a little disappointed, too. Sorry I destroyed a piece of your generation’s culture, kids.
