Cringe Culture is Cringe

Picture this: A bride is walking down the aisle. Pristine and angelic, she almost floats in her gown, practically glowing. Then she slips, her heel snagging on the train of her veil and she falls face first, the organ coming to an abrupt stop. What do you do? You look away, or maybe offer to help her up, but one thing is almost certain – You cringe. Chances are, everyone else will as well. Second-hand embarrassment is to be expected in situations as extreme as this, but for some reason, it takes Gen Z almost nothing to find something or someone “cringey.” 

Gen Z has brought some tremendous change into society, especially as the older half begin to enter the professional setting. Social boundaries are being set at much firmer and stronger standings than ever before, and work-life balance is being valued and more importantly, prioritized. The youth know their rights, but they are also very aware of all the wrongs you could make. Committing one of these social crimes and daring to be a little bit embarrassing can earn you a spot on the “Point and laugh!” pedestal. Now, it is not as if embarrassment and its second-hand counterpart are novel emotions. They are ingrained in all of us, but Gen Z has taken them and magnified them to fit any normal situation. Getting out of the car on a rainy school morning but not using an umbrella because that is “doing too much”. Knowing the answer to a question but not raising your hand, or only raising the elbow, because otherwise you would be a “try-hard”. The list only goes on.

The epidemic of being as unbothered and uninterested as you possibly can is infecting our generation, and it is causing a concerning amount of damage. Gen Z is a master archive of trends, but one is overstaying its welcome. Be nonchalant, demure, mindful. Be anything but expressive of what you truly feel. Be a mask. It can be argued that this is just teenage angst in the works. Millennial's and Gen X will say otherwise, however. The “blue-light stare” is apparently a common occurrence among teenagers and young adults. Similar to the shallow light emitting from our screens, our eyes and actions lack depth. Gen Z, particularly in the workplace, have difficulty connecting with their colleagues because they are more intent on doing their hours and making sure they are on the payroll, than having a relationship, however trivial, with their colleagues. The slightly older generations find it puzzling that we reserve our emotions for special occasions, as if they are not an inseparable piece of our identities. 

Millennial's had their own cringe culture, but theirs was a bit different. For them, cringe was almost cool. Not being like other girls, or liking an underground punk band that only 3 people knew about made you likable and being basic was being weird. Gen Z, somehow, has made all three of those behaviors “cringe”. We cringe at practically anything that is not picture-perfect and we do not even realize the gravity of the situation. It is clear that none of us truly are as unbothered as we may seem. For all we love to preach about mental health, we sure are not very good at practicing it. The boundaries we set and psychological buzzwords we use have led us to mistaking any sort of deep emotion as a violation of the peace we think nonchalance brings us. The standard of being invulnerable to life’s most basic and most extreme ironically makes us vulnerable and have breakdowns, or as we like to call them, crash outs. We are so afraid of vulnerability that we end up succumbing to it unknowingly. If we continue with this shared attitude of nonchalance and emotional unavailability, how will we learn what healthy, meaningful relationships look like when we have forced ourselves so far apart? How will we know if the secret emotions we suppress are trying to tell us something? Who will love us and who will we love? How will we know it’s love, if we don’t dare to love and fail in the first place? 

We are going to grow up one day and look back at ourselves at this moment in time, and possibly, we will laugh. Hopefully we will have matured, but one thing is for sure, we will cringe. Cringe at how embarrassing we found any minute oddity to be. The sooner we do that, the better. Because if there is anything genuinely worth being cringing at, it is cringe culture itself.