Ugh, Cringe is IN
Reclaiming cringe for fun and freedom. Normalwise 18/2/24.
Second-hand embarassment has an important social function. When we see someone make a fool of themselves on stage, say something stupid in a work meeting, or push a door with handles outstretched for a pull (I have done all three of these in the past week) we seem to reach out and pluck out some of their embarassment for ourselves. It gives us important social cues about what to avoid and how to preserve our reputations. For social creatures, good reputations give us security and access to resources. Knowing how to avoid catastrophic loss of reputation is probably so handy from an evolutionary perspective that we get a special ick feeling when someone is committing social suicide.
So let’s talk about this ick feeling, nowdays referred to colloquially as cringe. Remember when Adam Levine’s texts with his mistress were leaked (while his wife was pregnant)?
Websites dedicated whole pages to sifting through people’s cringe reactions. It’s hard not to have a strong response. The thought of having such intimate and shitty behaviour aired to the world is horrifying. Seriously, cringe is so much worse when the audience for our nosediving reputation is functionally infinite.
This is an example of the big rocks of cringe. Whenever a public figure has indecorous truths about them leaked to the public, everyone tends to get in on the action because it’s in the ‘public interest’. So it’s cringe, but we don’t really have to worry about the same thing happening to us plebeians. But there are a thousand other, smaller moments of cringe very much worth exploring in our own modest lives.
What about seeing someone flame out at an improv comedy night? The dawning realisation that they’re humiliating themselves on stage feels like torture; the stomach starts roiling with anxiety, the face screws up in a wince and we get tense. It’s as though we’re physically embodying what we imagine the desperate performer must be feeling - even if they seem oblivious. Cringe is fundamentally empathic.
Empathy, when employed to protect our reputations, can mislead us.
A vignette to illustrate. I once read a short article in a magazine called Monster Children. It was a short memoir about how the author had shit himself on his 30th birthday, and it was bad. It was like the author was short an idea, the magazine was short a story, and the two came together to print the literary equivalent of a hernia.
It was cringey to read. The author had clearly embarassed themselves (I don’t know why I was on my high horse actually - it was a surfing and skating magazine), but why should I care? Really, it was about me. I had always wanted to be a writer. In fact, if I’d only had the courage to put my work out there, reached out to enough publishers, my work could be in its place. My work, after all, was clearly better. What was the problem?
The problem was that I was too afraid to put myself out there.
'In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, probably talking about cringe
My cringe was, in fact, a perfect mirror of my own fear. It was tough to realise that, all along, I wasn’t worried about all the other shitty authors out there. I was worried about me. It was always about me.
And so it is for all our cringe. Even the agony of seeing Adam Levine text “holy fucking fuck” is casting an uncomfortable spotlight on parts of our lives we’d much rather remained secret. The dirty truth is that there are many Adam Levine’s out there not famous enough to get caught and a million improv comedy wannabees who aren’t courageous enough to make fools of themselves.
I think ‘cringe’ is such a pervasive modern paradigm because, with endless platforms to share ourselves with the world, we simply have so much more contact with everyone’s vulnerability. In the past, we had the luxury of selectively choosing what we revealed and to whom; we existed in small communities where inciting cringe in too many others risked shame and ostracisation. Now, we are constantly incentivised to share. And so, there’s more cringe.
The social ape in us wants to ignore cringe’s mirror-like truths. We want it to be about the other. But it isn’t. Ultimately, cringe is telling us plain and simple truths about us; that we’re afraid of putting ourselves out there, of attaching ourselves to something we made, of putting our hands up, or simply just being better people.
This can be liberating. Realising that our second-hand embarassment has nothing to do with someone else, and everything to do with us might be hard at first, but there's huge relief in knowing the discomfort is, in fact, all about us because then we can do something about it. We realise it's entirely within our control. We can even learn something about ourselves.
And, maybe, we stop worrying about others quite so much. Maybe we start seeing our fears for what they are. When we do that, cringe is a gift. Cringe is IN.
You Should Read This
As far as I know, there aren’t a ton of books on cringe, per se. But if we accept my thesis that cringe is the empathic realisation of our own fears, there’s no better remedy than Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant. It’s a simple book, with a breathtakingly simple idea; your life will dramatically improve when you truly love yourself. It’s so simple it feels trite, until you realise that confronting your inner demons, your fears and flaws can’t be done without self-love. How can you accept your dark side without first being prepared to love it unconditionally? How can you grow from your mistakes without first accepting you made them? Here, Ravikant shows us one of the central prerequisites for living fully in an emotionally naked autobiography. It has stuck with me.