Fear of being cringe holds back Gen Z, say academics and creators

In a TikTok video aimed at Cynthia Erivo, Katie Whitney, who has 2.5 million followers, speaks directly to the camera before softening her tone. “Hi Cynthia. Hi baby. Hey baby. How are you?” Commenters called the clip toe-curling and imagined how the Wicked star might react.

Whitney, now 25, began posting “weird skits” at 20 and is part of what users call CringeTok. The trend reflects a wider fear of appearing cringe that has spread from social media into classrooms and workplaces.

Embarrassment is not new, and shows from Fawlty Towers to The Office have long mined secondhand shame. Mental-health workers now treat cringe as a distinct form of shame that academics have studied and that some blame for keeping young people from taking risks.

A Yahoo/YouGov poll this year found that fear of seeming cringe stopped more than half of Gen Z from posting freely online, and 55 percent said it kept them from opening up emotionally. New York University professor Ocean Vuong told ABC News his students are “more and more self-conscious about trying” because of a “surveillance culture around social media.”

Roger Giner-Sorolla, a social-psychology professor at the University of Kent, defines cringe as “vicarious shame” that places someone under the “dim regard of other people.” Mark Beal, a communications professor at Rutgers University, places it in the category of feeling awkward or uncool.

A central feature is lack of self-awareness. “The implication of cringe is that if you had any self-awareness, you would realise that this reflects really poorly on you,” Giner-Sorolla said. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett gave the example of older people adopting younger slang without irony.

Gen Z lists sincerity, effort, and enthusiasm among the cringe traits, along with inauthenticity and most things associated with millennials. Skinny jeans, the crying-laughing emoji, and references to Harry Potter houses also rank high.

Natalie Soibatian, 24, posted last year that cringe is “crippling an entire generation.” She recalled a Los Angeles club where no one danced. “Everybody is afraid of being recorded,” she said. “Nobody is willing to participate unless somebody else starts, and nobody’s willing to start any more.”

Soibatian also sees the fear behind more conservative fashion choices. “People are far less likely to be experimental with their fashion,” she said.

Beal compared the experience to The Truman Show, except Gen Z knows the cameras are rolling. “Every pose, every look, every smile is either being judged, or they might feel it is being judged,” he said.

Whitney said the volume of comments became easier to ignore once her following passed one million. “It feels more separate from me,” she said. Giner-Sorolla noted that humans evolved for small-group living and are not equipped for “a million pairs of eyes” and conflicting standards.

Stefania Marzelia, who has nearly 600,000 TikTok followers and runs a Chicago coffee company, received a comment calling her posts cringy. She briefly considered stopping but later concluded that Gen Z is quick to label any open effort as cringe.

Child psychotherapist Georgie Gee said constant exposure to online voices can interfere with normal identity development. Giner-Sorolla advised narrowing focus to a trusted reference group. Burnett said real-world connections help more than large online audiences.

Gee suggested examining the internal voice that warns against cringe and remembering that identity is not fixed. Beal has heard from students whose planned digital detoxes stretched into weeks or months. Whitney calls the remedy “touching grass.”

Some Gen Z users now treat enthusiasm as newly acceptable. A meme phrase, “to be cringe is to be free,” has spread online. Marzelia said, “The world opens up for you on the other side of cringe.” Whitney recalled posting her first openly cringe video and feeling a weight lift: “Oh, who cares, now it’s out there … now I just get to do whatever.”

Soibatian offered her own test: “If somebody is clearly judging another person for doing something that they deem as cringe, that, for me, is cringy.”