Exploring “Cringe”
“My mom tried to hug me goodbye before school today. So cringe.”
“Still playing Roblox? So cringe.”
“It was cringy when they tried to teach us how to be ‘happy.’”
“I watched the Minecraft videos I made with my friends when I was young. I couldn’t bear the cringe.”
“He’s actually trying to learn something from this class. Isn’t that the most cringy thing ever?”
As an informal adjective, the word cringe means something that “causes feelings of acute embarrassment or awkwardness.” Teenagers use it all the time.
“Cringe” illustrates an underlying tendency that teenagers possess: a strong feeling of contempt for anything deemed too innocent or genuine. It would be easy to write off this phenomenon as “teenagers just trying to be cool,” but there is more to be explored.
Is Cringe Real?
Is cringe real? Do people really feel repulsed by innocent or genuine things, or is Cringe just a word that people use to disingenuously degrade things that they believe won’t look good for them? In other words, do teenagers actually dislike “cringy” things, such as saying “I love you” to their parents? (I know some of you “cringed” at the thought of that)
There is no way to know whether cringe is real. Some people will use it as just a term, whilst others will feel like throwing up whenever “cringe” happens.
Either way, there must be a reason why the word is used so often.
Why Cringe?
Why would teenagers have such loathing for innocent things?
Innocence is a standard of living. Innocence is an ideal. Innocence, as an ideal, is what people desire deep down. Even if people don’t want innocence itself, they value characteristics that are associated with innocence. Characteristics that stray away from innocence are almost always seen as a deterioration of moral values. People don’t like teenagers who swear because it is a deterioration of the innocent standard. People don’t like teenagers who disrespect their parents. People don’t like teenagers who fall under substance abuse. All of these situations that go against innocence are considered degeneracy.
Innocence is an ideal. And, by definition, ideals are meant to judge every action and say that everything isn’t good enough. Ideals are not meant to be achieved and are guidelines to live life by presenting the perfect, best-case situation. Because there is no perfect individual, ideals will always judge someone as insufficient. Interestingly, the etymology of “innocence” is from the Latin verb, noceo, meaning to harm; innocent, therefore, means “unharmed.” It is impossible to never be disillusioned from innocent values or live completely innocently. So, even by etymology, the ideal of innocence calls everyone “harmed” individuals.
Teens hate being called out. I loved comfort zones. I had an ego to protect and anything that challenged it was a threat that needed to be taken down. But, being an ideal, innocence will always call teens out for not being innocent. Thus, it is only natural that teens despise it. When people despise ideals, something very interesting happens.
As Nietzsche said, humans tend to trod down on ideals that they know they will never achieve; pretending like ideals are bad is the only that the human psyche copes with not obtaining the ideal. Teens are no different: once they realize they will never achieve the ideal, they agree that the ideal itself is bad and insult it. When people mock, disrespect, and thus destroy an ideal, it feels much better to them: there is no longer the voice of ideal innocence nagging away telling teens that they aren’t enough.
But does dragging the name of innocence on the ground make the nagging voice fade away or actually disappear?
