As a general rule, you do not have to know what culture writers are posting about. Assume that it’s happening at strange times and in strange ways. Some of this is due to the specific pressures of the journalism industry; some of it is just because culture writers are strange. Culture writing, on balance, is ironically rage-inducing in stridently banal ways because it is either the product of dull provocation or brainless poptimism. The fact that a show like Ted Lasso could garner critical acclaim is not only an indictment of American society, but it inadvertently served as a precursor to the LinkedIn midwits who marvel at the superficial trappings of AI slop. There are a lot of finicky tics in this genre of writing, most of it serving as glorified PR for big studios and major labels. Otherwise, there’s a consistent churn of curdled ragebait and the type of cultural analysis that circles the symptoms of capitalist entropy without diagnosing capitalism itself. I assume the intended audience for this drivel are people who think they’re clever because they found the arrow in the FedEx logo.
Being the completely normal and definitely not petty news consumer that I am, I caved to my baser impulses when I came across a headline titled “Cringe! How millennials became uncool.” This unsettling nostalgia washed over me, a pandemic flashback of doomscrolling through Zoomers and millennials arguing over jeans. The libidinal thrill of hate-reading a disposable article about a generation aging out of coolness should be innocuous enough, but it was oddly reassuring that I had already come to accept my fading cultural relevancy when I turned 30. As a millennial, it has been interesting to watch my peers age horrendously, considering we were the generation that coined the term “adulting.” I won’t bore you with specifics like the epidemic of Harry Potter adults, but it has always been baffling to me as to why adults in their 30s—especially ones in committed relationships or with families—feel the need to have their social capital validated by strangers. Who are they trying to impress? I mean, sure, I maintain an online presence in the form of a blog/newsletter, but unless you’re fucking me or paying me, I don’t really need your approval. (Your likes and comments are still nice, though.)
The question that has historically defined a person’s ability to age gracefully is, How much of your personal identity and self-esteem is tied up into following trends? As a passionate defense of my generation and the things I grew up with, I refuse to succumb to the cultural trends pressuring millennials to feel bad about enjoying millennial things.
What keeps us grounded in staying human, or at least authentically ourselves, is the realization that everything is made up. Fashion, culture, taste—it’s all a social construct. Why should I care if listening to indie folk is out of style? Every breath I take pulls me closer to my inevitable demise. There are only so many more sunsets I will see, so many more times I will grab beers with my friends, and you want me to be self-conscious about whether I’m too old to use the word bussin’? I’m out here wrestling with the fact that all of reality is merely a fever dream sucking us all into the darkness of one subconscious, and you want me to double-check if ankle socks are no longer cool? I just watched a Google Veo3 ad featuring AI-generated humans losing their absolute shit over how they are all prompts living in a simulation, which could raise the possibility that we just discovered a parallel universe and we could also be trapped in the Truman Show following prompts from something else, and you want me to question whether I should enjoy avocado toast?
We just went out to clubs with our infinity scarves and danced to LMFAO, then we posted 127 blurry pictures of us ripping Jagerbombs with people we vaguely knew, and it was a night of cringe. Then, we would title that Facebook album something even more cringe, like We’re on a boaat muthafuckas. My best work was Tuesday = the best night of the week pt. 1 and it would be 32 photos of me and my friends playing Halo in someone’s basement.
I will not be called cringe by a generation that can barely read and write in complete sentences. Don’t get me started on cursive. A Zoomer coworker once informed me that it was cringe to end text message sentences with punctuations. Someone wearing denim gauchos with crew socks is not going to make me feel uncool. And I don’t see how the younger generations who do TikTok dances and have embraced TradCath aesthetics have any basis to call something “uncool.” That shit makes me have second-hand embarrassment.
To crib a passage from Liz Plank:
“…millennial hate is just envy in disguise. People love to make fun of us. They roll their eyes at our Hogwarts houses, our pumpkin spice, our absolute earnestness. They make fun of us for believing in self-care before it was swallowed whole by corporate wellness, for treating the internet like a playground before it turned into an all-seeing panopticon, for experiencing our youth as something to be lived rather than optimized…
Maybe that’s why every Gen Z trend is just a heavily filtered, slightly ironic version of something we already did first. The claw clips, the wired headphones, the digital cameras, half of their aesthetic are straight up lifted straight from our Facebook albums. They aren’t mocking our past so much as repackaging it, fetishizing a time they never got to live. They’ll clown us for our side parts, then quietly buy our old butterfly hair clips. They’ll call us cringe, then post blurry flash photos of themselves at a dive bar with the same wide-eyed, cranberry-vodka-fueled chaos that defined our 2013.”
Millennials were built on cringe, and our upbringing embraced it. I’ve been noticing a lot more millennialcore and millennial cringe comps on my Instagram feed, and the idea of You’re being millennial is now synonymous with being cringe, an update on OK, boomer.
This idea has become so pervasive that it feels like the desire to tell someone they’re being cringe is stronger than the feeling of cringe itself. If someone felt comfortable enough to record a video or take a photo of themselves and post it online, then they must feel confident in how they present themselves to the world. So to be met with an onslaught of nameless, faceless assholes accusing you of cringe—often for something as benign as a facial expression—then social media is truly a panopticon hellscape of insufferable nihilistic nerds policing each other’s mannerisms. This is unmitigated hall monitor behavior. We’re just discouraging people from setting themselves apart in any way. The fear of cringe can create a fear of curiosity and discovery, and if we’re conditioning ourselves to respond in specific ways to whatever is happening around us, then we’re just developing a distaste for individuality.
The fear of being cringe is unfathomably cringe. I can’t think of anything more bitch-made than refusing to live life on your terms because of some ambient axiety over whether some rando will to judge you for it. I understand that this is an ironic sentiment for me to end this rant on, considering my newsletter is built on mocking pop culture, hobbies, and bad TV shows, but … life is short, enjoy what you want to enjoy.
Also, looking back, our word for cringe was “gay.”
You can't convince me half the reason "millennial cringe" content exists isn't just to serve consumerism, either.
It *needs* folks doing friggin ankle sock overhauls, buying the latest Amazon claw clip packs (but saying it's thrifted), throwing out every last pair of skinny jeans for their baggy cousins, which in turn they'll throw out in 1.5 years once those are no longer deemed cool. Just endlessly buying your way out of embarrassment! Yay!
What a world 🥲
I find the use of the term “cringe” cringeworthy.