"Cringe Culture" has ruined lives

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I had been seeing this "cringe" term used at various times mostly here on this board.
Had to look it up and read about it. It seems just another term for bullying and "calling out" anybody who is different... the worst possible insult is to tell somebody ""you are not like us and never will be" !

(as if most of us had not already experienced this treatment for a great part of our lives.) I think its simply a currently fashionable name for the practice of sorting the herd, something that it seems may have been with us since we walked on all 4s.

What do you mean by cringle culture though? When I hear this I tend to think of the old days of watching people on Popstars / X-Factor. Some of those performances were genuinely cringy but I understand your point that it could be taking advantage of vulnerable people.

Nowadays what I find cringy is something like Who is America where it's more of a political point, and the subject is not an everyday person who doesn't need that kind of attention in their life.

I think Madonna was cringe back in the days. She would be one of the earliest cringe.

Where are you running into these kinds of social pressures? On social media? At school? At work? In your neighborhood?

If you are running into this sort of thing mainly online, I would suggest being more selective about where you go online. Avoid clusters of random young people. Instead, look for online groups of people who share your specific interests. For example, if you like a particular musician, look for groups of fans of that particular musician. In a group defined as being for fans of a particular musician, that musician's music won't suddenly become "cringe."

(Also, for your own protection, I would strongly recommend doing most of your online activity under a pseudonym, not under your legal name. See Warnings about online harassment.)

If you are running into extreme social pressures in real life, e.g., in your neighborhood or at school, you might want to consider making it a longterm goal to move to someplace where you can be relatively free of such pressures. To that end, big cities are likely to be better than small towns. Best of all would be a neighborhood where there are lots of immigrants from many different countries all over the world, with no one dominant ethnic group. In such a neighborhood, there can't possibly be any narrow cultural mold that everyone is expected to conform to.

I agree. People are mean online as well, against anyone who isn’t following the mainstream and likes other things.

I’ve learned to just ignore others, I’m still very sensitive but I’ve improved a lot. People calling out others as cringe are really cringe themselves. So self absorbed that they cannot see their behaviour is childish.

The people who matter in your life won’t think you’re cringe. And if they do, they’re not as important as you once thought I guess.

Social media in general is a very toxic environment, especially for younger people and neurodivergents.