Amit, a 31-year-old senior software developer from Uttar Pradesh, who currently lives in Bangalore and works remotely for a US-based company, usually spends his work breaks watching YouTube Shorts. More than anything else, he prefers consuming so-called cringe content. “It’s quick and funny. Also, I don’t really want to commit to a good movie or show during weekdays.”
He thought for a couple of minutes when I asked him about the appeal of cringe. “It’s a bit like watching Mr Bean, you know?” he said, referring to the TV show, a staple of Millennial childhoods, that showed the eponymous protagonist make a fool of himself as he went through the motions of daily life.
Despite the term’s ubiquity, defining “cringe” is difficult.
According to the Oxford English Language Dictionary definition, cringe is something that causes “feelings of acute embarrassment or awkwardness”. Kate Ryan, writing for the New York Times, says that “cringe is not any one thing, but you know it when you see it”. Vox describes it as “a shortened form of ‘cringey’, which itself is a shortened form of ‘cringeworthy’, referring to the embarrassment (often the second-hand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché”. As should be apparent from these definitions, recognising something as cringe is highly subjective.
I may cringe, for example, when I see an obviously staged video of our Prime Minister interacting “candidly” with commuters on the Delhi Metro, or when I encounter Indians using words like “nigga” or “y’all”. Someone else may do so when they see a couple from Patna dancing with abandon.
This subjectivity makes it difficult to ascertain exactly how much entertainment we derive from cringe content. Some statistics are available, however, to help us form an estimate.
For instance, as of 2023, the time average Indians spend on social media was more than four times of what they spend on OTT apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Among these social media users, as many as 25 crores are users of short-form video (SFV) platforms such as Reels, Shorts, Moj, etc., and 98 per cent of daily mobile video engagement is taken up by Millennials and Gen Z. Before TikTok was banned by the Government of India in June 2020, our country of 1.3 billion people had already spent 5.5 billion hours on the app in 2019.
While we may not talk about the Reels and Shorts we watch the same way we talk about attending a popular concert or going out to a movie, it is clear that in the last few years, our idea of entertaining ourselves has come to mean watching under-a-minute videos on our smartphones.
They fit most neatly in the grooves of our 24/7 work lives, they do not ask for active engagement, and nobody ever runs out of new videos to watch. For many of us, like Amit, it’s how we begin and end a typical day.
A unique thing about this particular form of entertainment is the blurred line between creators and consumers. Since most of what we consume is created by people just as amateur as us, some contempt is to be expected. Moreover, online discourse with its constantly shifting definitions of cool and uncool, as well as a general tone of mockery is perfectly suited to things being recognised as cringe. The image of millennials scrolling their endless feeds to watch content they apparently find embarrassing, while others produce more and more of that content, makes one wonder what is the appeal of cringe for our generation, and what does that appeal imply?
When I asked people why they watch the Reels and Shorts they often share with disclaimers like “I watched it, so you must watch it too”, their answers were variations on the theme that they engage with such content just to see “that type of people”.
Implicit in this explanation is an other-ing of a particular “type” of people, which makes sense because identifying something as cringe is essentially an act of gatekeeping. By laughing at people whose antics we call cringe, we want to reassure ourselves and others that we are better than those people, that we fit the aesthetics of what is considered cool or, at least normal, on the internet.
According to Natalie Wynn, an award-winning YouTuber and cultural critic, what makes cringe irresistible to us is the combination of schadenfreude and a boost in our self-esteem. When we see someone act without self-awareness (regardless of whether this acting is intentional or not) we are repulsed because we imagine ourselves in their shoes for just a moment. Yet we laugh at them, and keep going back for more, because we want to treat ourselves to the comfortable realisation that there is someone worse, and more embarrassing, out there.
The self-validating voyeurism of cringe has its own categories, its own language.
“Nibba-Nibbi” videos, for example, are videos of teenage couples whose public displays of affection are deemed too sappy and immature, their subjects are trolled and often asked to finish their homework before making promises of everlasting love. A “lolcow” is someone who can be milked for laughs or LOL moments. Their content can be shared, dissected, and then reposted to make fun of it. “Humilitainment” or “hatewatching” are terms used to describe the act of seeking entertainment in content that shows, or hints at the possibility of, someone’s humiliation. Certain types of videos – things like bad lip-syncs, skits in rural settings, or experimental recipes – are also broadly accepted as cringe mines.
Evidence of our fascination is also apparent in the immense popularity of cringe-reaction videos.
Most of them, like Nischay Malhan’s (21.4 million subscribers on YouTube) videos, are juvenile rants pretending to be better than the objects of their ridicule. They are the online equivalent of schoolyard bullying, and the millions who watch them are ringside connoisseurs of caustic power play. It may or may not be true elsewhere in the world, but it is easy to observe in our country that the identification and consumption of cringe is undeniably associated with punching down in the established social hierarchy.
To understand this better, I talked to Yashraj Sharma, an FPA London awardee journalist, who met several content creators and consumers from rural and semi-urban areas in the aftermath of TikTok’s demise and Instagram Reels’ rise in 2021. “This idea or trend of sharing so much of so-called cringe content has really grown in the last few years,” he said.
A big reason behind our obsession, Sharma reckons, is that calling out some content (generally the stuff produced on cheaper phones, without an awareness of the acceptable aesthetics or etiquette on social media platforms) as cringe is our reaction to the light this content shines on the caste-class divide around us. It is no coincidence, after all, that TikTok was the platform that brought “cringe culture” to the fore because unlike Instagram and YouTube the majority of TikTok’s creators were from villages and Tier III cities.
With fourteen regional languages available to them on the platform, TikTokers could set the aesthetic however they wanted, and it worked for them: at the time TikTok was banned in India, four out of the world’s fifteen highest-paid TikTokers were Indian. In contrast, when Reels was launched in India it carried the baggage of Instagram’s aspirational aesthetic with it. The TikTokers, expectedly found it difficult to make the transition, with Sanatan Mahto, a popular creator, telling Sharma that he is not able to connect with the songs in the trends on Instagram. “Samaj hi nahi aata hai (I cannot understand it).”
It is precisely this inability to connect, or fit, on the cringe creators’ end of the lens, that looks so cringey from our end of the screen.
Funnily enough, as Millennials slowly age out of internet dominance, various traits of our generation are being identified as cringeworthy by the younger folks out there.
A popular example of our supposedly embarrassing online behaviour is the “Millennial pause”, the moment we typically take before speaking in a video recording. Mentions of Millennials and “cringiness” actually saw a 119 per cent increase between November 2022 and October 2023, according to Meltwater. There is even a TikTok trend in the US called “Millennial Core” dedicated to making fun of millennial clichès and cultural mainstays like F.R.I.E.N.D.S and Harry Potter. It will only be so long until we import the millennial cringe trend to India.
I am sure there is an opportunity for an earnest take in this ironical twist of pop culture, but I will refrain from expressing it because – you guessed it – “takes” are so clearly cringe in 2024!
Excerpted with permission from Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really?, AM Gautam, Aleph Book Company.
