Let’s talk about pet peeves. Have you ever been incredibly excited about something happening in your life, like a new hobby or a band you recently became obsessed with, then you run to tell the person next to you all about it, and their response has a particular, annoying adjective that makes you feel bad about your response: “cringe?”
We live in a world where everything genuine and vulnerable is somehow painted as embarrassing, like admitting you have a crush on someone, being the first to say “I love you,” or writing a heartfelt paragraph in a text. The internet transformed dating into a competition of who can fake better, who can play cold and nonchalant.
In the realm of social media, where people attempt to sound perfect all the time, everybody is afraid of coming across as too much, as desperate. How about not giving enough?
Are we the problem?
There are many reasons this is one of the struggles our generation faces. By treating vulnerability as weakness and indifference as confidence, we actively create adults who are emotionally unavailable and only preoccupied with protecting how they are perceived.
Ironically, our very efforts to avoid social embarrassment are what put us in an isolation that makes it impossible for us to connect. Here are some ways in which that self-sabotage happens in our lives.
The Spotlight Effect
Not to call anyone out, but we humans have a particular psychological tendency: overestimating how much other people notice us, whether that is appearance-wise, general behavior, or even the mistakes we make.
In 2000, Thomas Gilovich, alongside other researchers, categorized this social phenomenon as the Spotlight Effect. What’s interesting (and awfully suitable for this article) is that one of the experiments actually happened on a college campus. Students were asked to wear an embarrassing shirt, and it turned out they predicted twice the number of people who actually noticed it.
You might avoid dancing and singing at a party, asking basic questions in class, or posting funny pictures of yourself on Instagram because you think people will judge you. In reality, this is just cringe culture. Most of the time, you’re sacrificing such experiences, despite the fact that people are not even paying attention to them.
Impression Management
Some people criticize actors for their ability to impersonate others on screen, and yet they do it themselves in their own lives, and they don’t even get paid to.
According to sociologist Ervin Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, people manage the impressions they make on others, presenting the versions of themselves that they deem will create the most positive response, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Cringe culture made this even more extreme. People are deliberately waiting hours to respond to the person they are flirting with, pretending not to be excited about an invitation, or even icing people out in person. They think that’ll soften the blow if they get rejected, or even worse, that this is the way to build power dynamics that favor them and their egos.
The liking gap
In 2018, a study by Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom, and Margaret Clark revealed that we’re even worse at reading others than we probably expected. In investigating conversations between friends and acquaintances, they discovered that people regularly underestimated how much the person they were exchanging with liked them. They call it the liking gap.
It’s not about someone being unfriendly or uninviting. People just didn’t get the signs of approval being sent by the other person. What makes this even more puzzling is that this wasn’t a short experience either. The liking gap persisted over several months as students got to know each other, all because people are so self-aware and preoccupied that they projected their own evaluation of themselves onto the other person.
Is being cringe even that bad?
Perhaps this is a matter of re-signifying cringe. What if, for once, being enthusiastic and accessing your inner child’s pure happiness is not actually embarrassing? What if displaying emotion starts being considered an act of bravery?
Go ahead and post that picture, dance your embarrassment away, or tell that special person how you actually feel. Be cringe! People aren’t really looking most of the time. They probably like you more than you estimate, and what you’re doing in your own mind is hyper-managing yourself.
Remember, nobody’s opinion is that important. Oftentimes, they don’t even have an opinion. Even if they do, then that’s their problem. Let them micromanage that characteristic of themselves.
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