This Essay Is So Cringe

Imagine being asked what you love and feeling the need to edit your answer before it leaves your mouth. You like that band, because saying you love them is too much. You watched the movie three times, but it could never be your favorite. You have a favorite character, a favorite singer, a favorite book, a favorite person, a favorite place, a favorite song that makes your chest ache, but the moment you consider telling someone, another voice arrives: That is so embarrassing. So you shrug “It’s fine.” “I don’t really care.” “Whatever.” You make the joke before anybody else gets the chance to make it about you. And perhaps that is the strangest social habit of our generation: we have learned to humiliate our own sincerity before anyone else can.

We call it being nonchalant—not caring—we call it being chill. We should call it having no emotional investment in anything that could potentially make us look foolish. But sometimes I wonder whether we are actually becoming less nonchalant and more terrified. Because genuine indifference does not require an audience. The person who genuinely does not care does not need to tell you that they do not care. We do. It has reached the point that we have made enthusiasm suspicious and earnestness embarrassing. We have developed an almost reflexive instinct to look unimpressed by the things that secretly matter most to us. And somewhere along the way, “I love this” became more frightening to say than “I hate this.”

“Cringe” used to mean embarrassment. Now it seems to mean almost anything sincere enough to expose you. Dancing alone in your room isn’t cringe until you imagine someone watching. Posting the song you have had on repeat all week isn’t cringe until you picture someone replying, Who asked? Wearing something you genuinely like isn’t cringe until you start wondering whether someone will think you’re trying too hard. Getting excited about a book can feel embarrassing once you realize someone might think your taste is predictable. Telling your friends you miss someone can feel embarrassing. Complimenting someone too sincerely can feel embarrassing. Trying something new can feel embarrassing. Even being visibly proud of yourself can feel like you have crossed some invisible line.

Even happiness has acquired a disclaimer. We have become so accustomed to the possibility of being watched that we perform our lives as though there is always a comment section underneath, as if our own life had to satisfy everyone’s standards apart from our own. Recently, psychologists have long studied what is called the “fear of negative evaluation”: the tendency to worry about being judged, criticized, rejected, or viewed unfavorably by other people. Research has found that people high in this fear can become especially sensitive to signs of negative emotion in others, sometimes interpreting ambiguous expressions as more negative than they actually are.

I think this distinction matters because the modern problem we have is not simply that people are judging us. It is that we have become remarkably good at imagining that they are. We are so used to this idea of “cringing” at what other people do that when someone glances at our outfit you wonder if they hate it. When someone does not react to your post and you wonder if they thought it was embarrassing. When someone laughs while you’re talking and suddenly you are replaying your sentence to determine whether you sounded stupid. The courtroom is often inside our own heads. And the judge is sometimes a person who was not even paying attention.

For most of human history, embarrassment had a relatively small radius. You could embarrass yourself in front of your friends. Maybe your classmates. Maybe your entire school if you were particularly unlucky. But eventually, people forgot. Now, theoretically, nothing has to disappear; embarrassment can become permanent. A bad outfit can be photographed, a weird dance can be reposted, a badly worded caption can be screenshotted, a moment of sincerity can be removed from its context and turned into entertainment for strangers. The possibility of being perceived has expanded far beyond the number of people we can actually know.

The tragedy is that most people are far less interested in us than we think. We shouldn’t see this as an insult, but rather as liberation. We spend enormous amounts of psychological energy imagining ourselves from the outside, as though everyone else has been assigned the task of monitoring our behavior. But other people are usually busy performing the same exhausting surveillance on themselves. You are worried about how your hair looks. They are worried about how their hair looks. You are wondering whether your joke landed. They are wondering whether their response did. We are all simultaneously actors and audiences, and somehow we have forgotten that everyone else is also terrified of being perceived.

This is partly why this phenomenon is so cruel. We are collectively constructing a social environment that many of us privately dislike. We pretend to be more detached than we are because we believe everyone else values detachment. Everyone else does the same thing because they believe we value it. This is a problem of social norms and pluralistic ignorance: people may privately want authenticity and less judgment while behaving according to what they believe everyone else expects. We say we don’t want judgement but we are first to judge. Millions of people think, I wish everyone would just be themselves, while simultaneously thinking, But I better not be myself first. Think about how absurd that is.

I think this is where the nonchalant epidemic becomes genuinely sad. Because caring is not inherently embarrassing. Caring is one of the most human things we do. There is something almost childlike about loving something without immediately asking whether the love is socially acceptable. A child does not say, “I probably shouldn’t tell people dinosaurs are my favorite because dinosaurs are a little mainstream right now.” A child does not calculate whether their favorite color is aesthetically relevant. They simply love the dinosaur and they love the color. Then, somewhere around adolescence, the audience arrives. Suddenly every preference communicates something about you.

Your music says something about your personality. Your clothes say something about your social status. Your books say something about your intelligence. Your hobbies say something about your identity. Your taste becomes carefully curated evidence. And once everything becomes evidence, everything becomes a risk. So we stop saying what we like. Or worse, we only say the things we don’t like, and irony becomes a safety net. We can enjoy a cheesy song if we pretend it is a guilty pleasure. We can obsess over a fictional character if we make fun of ourselves for doing it. If everyone laughs, we were joking. If everyone loves it, we were sincere. If everyone hates it, we can pretend we never cared. We have built an escape hatch into every expression of ourselves.

This idea of having perfectly socially acceptable opinions is so dangerous because it traps us in an endless cycle of stagnation. How so? Think about an extraordinary person you admire. At some point, they probably looked ridiculous. Every artist had an awkward early phase. Every musician sounded bad before they sounded good. Every writer wrote embarrassing first drafts. Every dancer had to dance before they could dance beautifully. Every person who became exceptional had a period where their ambition exceeded their ability, because beginners are inherently cringe. There is no elegant way to be bad at something. You have to survive being seen before they were impressive.

That is the part we keep forgetting. We want the confidence without the awkwardness. The talent without the years of looking untalented. The relationship without the possibility of rejection. The creative life without the vulnerability of making something that someone might hate. But you cannot have one without the other. The willingness to look foolish is not the opposite of confidence. It is one of its core ingredients. And perhaps that is why cringe can be so psychologically powerful. It represents something deeper than embarrassment. It represents uncontrolled visibility. You are revealing something before you know how it will be received. You are saying: This matters to me. And then waiting.

We have started using nonchalance and “cringe” as a social weapon against vulnerability. We use it when someone is trying too hard. Sometimes that criticism is fair. But we also use it when someone loves something more openly than we would dare to. We use it when someone dances badly. When someone is earnest. When someone is excited. When someone tries. When someone does not perfectly understand the invisible rules of coolness. And perhaps we should ask ourselves why that bothers us so much. Why does another person’s enthusiasm make us uncomfortable? Why is someone who openly cares so much easier to mock than someone who openly does not care at all?

You can spend your entire life attempting to become impossible to mock, and you will still be mocked by someone. So perhaps the goal should not be becoming unjudgeable. Perhaps it should be becoming uncontrolled by judgment. Let someone think your favorite song is terrible. Let someone think your outfit is weird. Let someone think your hobby is childish. Let someone roll their eyes because you are too excited. Their opinion does not have to become your identity. I want us to become embarrassing again. I want people to admit when they are excited. I want people to dance at parties without checking whether anyone is filming. I want people to make their art. I want people to write poems that are too earnest. I want people to fall in love and be obvious about it. I want people to commit.

Because enthusiasm is not something we should have to recover from. It is evidence that something reached us. There is absolutely nothing particularly impressive about looking like nothing matters to you. I would much rather meet the person whose eyes light up when they talk about something they love. The person who tries. The person who cares. Maybe that person will be cringe. Good. Because one day, you are going to look back at all the things you refused to love loudly because someone might judge you, and you will realize something devastating: Nobody was thinking about you nearly as much as you were thinking about yourself. And if you have to choose between being perceived as cringe and never allowing yourself to be fully perceived at all, I hope you choose cringe. Every single time.