Cringe Is the New Cool (and the Other Way Around)

She hesitates for a second before posting. It’s a photo of her in front of a bowl of chips, a single slice of Babybel resting on the edge like some kind of joke. She writes: “girl dinner lol” and adds a laughing-crying emoji. Then, just in case, she follows up with: “It’s ironic, obviously.” Because it has to be. Because you can’t just post something sincerely anymore—you have to cloak it in a joke. You have to disarm it. Always. Before you even like something, you already have to apologize for it.

We’ve become experts at detachment. Everything is “kind of a joke,” “kind of cringe,” “kinda dumb but that’s the point.” We adore things in secret, laugh about them in public. We make camp playlists citing Britney and Shrek, but it has to be meta. We hoard reaction gifs of celebrities mid-emotional meltdown while saying, “it’s not that deep.”

Cool switched sides. It’s no longer loud and proud—it’s disguised. It wears irony like armor. It pretends not to care. But that’s the lie. There is love underneath. Real love. Messy, loud, too-much-to-handle love—buried under layers of second-degree sarcasm.

And that’s what this episode is about. About the moment irony became our default. About the Y2K revival, the rise of Girl Dinner, cringe marketing, stan accounts, and this weird era where everything’s ridiculous—until it suddenly becomes a trend. We’re talking about a generation that would rather disable its feelings than risk having them. And about what it would take, today, to say without flinching: “Yeah. I actually love this.”

The Reign of Second-Degree Irony

There’s a scene that’s become almost mundane online, but it says everything about the times we’re in. A blurry video of a teenager crying while watching a movie. He tries to hide it. He knows he’s being filmed. And still, he cries. The comment section? Always the same: “Bro is in his feelings,” “Cringe but relatable,” “Mood.” A bit of empathy, drenched in irony. Emotion is never left untouched. It gets translated, twisted, flipped into a punchline. We haven’t stopped feeling things. We’ve just stopped showing them without a layer of protection.

Second-degree irony has become the mother tongue of a generation that no longer knows where sincerity ends and comedy begins. It’s not a tool—it’s a reflex. A social shell we slip on before we even admit to liking anything. We love belting out Hannah Montana songs, but we make sure to say it’s “just for laughs.” We still swoon over Titanic and Twilight, but only if it’s framed as kitschy nostalgia. “I’m just watching this for fun, don’t worry.” Don’t worry—especially. Don’t think it’s serious. Don’t think it actually touches me.

But this phenomenon isn’t new. It goes deeper than TikTok. Post-ironic humor was born from the ruins of ‘90s enthusiasm and 2000s cynicism. Even on Tumblr, people would post quotes from The Virgin Suicides next to absurd memes. Real pain paired with deliberately ridiculous pop aesthetics. It was funny, beautiful, disturbing. And it was a way to talk about ourselves without doing it head-on. Over time, irony became the only emotionally safe space.

Then came Twitter. TikTok. Instagram. The age of performance. The era of the Story. The tweet that gets 80,000 likes because it condenses your trauma into three words and an emoji. Personal content had to become entertaining to be seen. So we learned to laugh at ourselves before anyone else could. We posted our failures with a funny filter. Turned our anxieties into memes. “I wanna disappear lol,” “guess I’m getting ghosted again lmao.” Humor became a bulletproof vest.

But the price? A crumbling sincerity. We started living in the blur. Confusing vulnerability with storytelling. No longer sure whether what we say is true, or just socially approved. To truly like something these days—for real—feels like an act of bravery. Because the collective gaze is ruthless. It analyzes. Mocks. Recycles. Categorizes you. And its favorite word? “Cringe.”

The word “cringe” has mutated. Originally, it described a physical reaction—a squirm, a wince in the face of something painfully awkward. Now, it’s anything that dares to be earnest without irony. Anything that refuses to apologize. A fangirl crying at a concert? Cringe. A guy admitting he likes Coldplay? Cringe. A teen posting a video of herself singing? Cringe. Normality has become embarrassing. And everyone’s afraid of ending up in some viral thread as a screenshot meme.

But this rejection of sincerity isn’t just cultural—it’s emotional self-defense. A collective coping mechanism in a world that’s saturated, unstable, ironic to the point of exhaustion. We live in a time where narratives shift constantly, where our reference points blur, where identity is under constant surveillance. So we learn to say nothing directly. To code our feelings. To wrap them in filters, in jokes, in glitchy edits and feigned lightness.

And that’s even more true in “cool” spaces. Artistic scenes, digital cliques, queer or femme communities where style is a statement. Where once excess was a political act, now it’s a delicate balancing act. Too much passion and you’re suspicious. Too much vulnerability and you’re a buzzkill. The norm is to not believe too hard. To stay chill. To play the game—but never burn.

And yet… it’s cracking. We feel it. This constant irony is wearing us down. It dulls full joy, raw sadness, uninhibited laughter. It creates personas always one step removed, like we’re performing glitchy versions of ourselves. People who love—but only if they don’t admit it. Who feel—but only if it can be posted as a meme.

So we come back to this question: do we still know how to love—unfiltered? Do we still know how to cry, dance, feel… without warning ourselves against it first? Or have we unlearned sincerity, just because it no longer fits the feed?

Cringe as the New Aesthetic Standard

After years of turning everything into a joke, ridicule has become desirable. Cringe is no longer something to avoid—it’s a style. A stance. A strategy for exposure.

It’s no coincidence that the Y2K comeback didn’t bring back the 2000s as they were, but as we imagine them through a saturated VHS filter. It’s not reality that’s returning—it’s the badly-aged fantasy, deliberately awkward. Sticky lip gloss, butterfly rings, uncomfortable low-rise jeans. Things we would’ve torn apart in 2010, but now we adore… because we present them as hilarious.

And at the core of this cultural flip? Camp. Popularized by Susan Sontag in the 1960s and later reinvented by queer and post-Internet pop culture, camp celebrates what is too much. Too kitschy, too dramatic, too artificial to be taken seriously. It’s Cher in a feathered gown. Lady Gaga in a meat dress. The vibe of “I know it’s ugly, and that’s why it’s great.” Camp has become the decompression chamber between mainstream culture and full-on absurdity. It allows us to love while laughing, to consume without fully buying in, to perform without compromise.

That’s exactly the posture you see in the Girl Dinner aesthetic. A slice of Babybel, three pickles, and a Diet Coke on a dessert plate? That’s no longer a non-meal—it’s a statement. An aesthetic of exhaustion, disengagement, intentional disarray. Posted with soft self-irony, a warm filter, and a silent subtext: “I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s me.” What used to be shameful becomes a symbol of cultural surrender—a way to say: I’m not perfect, and that’s the whole point.

Cringe has become armor. And that armor? It’s trendy. So trendy, in fact, that it’s now being recycled by the very people who mocked it yesterday. Brands, of course. Because where there’s a posture, there’s a market.

Enter cringe marketing: campaigns that lean into awkwardness, self-deprecation, and vintage cheesiness to build fake intimacy. Corporations pretending to be jaded teenagers on TikTok. Ads riding the “cheugy” aesthetic. Intentionally bad slogans, obnoxious jingles. The goal? Build a connection through meta-humor. “We know this sucks. But we know you know. So it’s cool.” It’s an unspoken pact between brand and consumer. A bottom-up strategy of fake relatability.

But this normalization of cringe raises a deeper question: if everything is potentially ridiculous, what’s left to say something real? If every action must be softened by a joke, if every gesture needs preemptive irony… then what are we even communicating?

The problem is, cringe is a double-edged language. It protects—but it isolates. It amuses—but it desensitizes. It makes everything acceptable—and therefore… nothing impactful. It’s an aesthetic that dulls instead of revealing. An aesthetic of emotional avoidance. And the algorithm loves that. Because it makes for smooth, shareable, viral content—but not too subversive. Not too radical. Not too sincere.

And here’s the paradox: this staging of awkwardness—whether intentional or not—ends up being cool. Viral videos of teens dancing badly. TikToks of boomers singing off-key. Photos labeled “ugly hot.” All of it becomes algorithmic tenderness. We like. We comment “iconic.” We laugh. We share. But we stay in an emotionally safe zone. We rehabilitate the ugly… but we don’t really love it. We celebrate failure—but only if it’s curated, coded, stylized.

Because real cringe—the raw kind, unaware of itself—is still mocked. Still clipped. Still exposed. It makes people uncomfortable. It doesn’t fit the mold. It forgot to add a funny caption, a retro filter, a background track to make its moment digestible. And that’s where the rupture lies.

Acceptable cringe is always controlled cringe. A performance of authenticity—not authenticity itself. A sanitized, aestheticized, approved version. And more than that: a marketable version. Cringe has become a commodity, a brand identity, a quick-hit tool for relatability. It’s the “I’m just like you” 2.0—upgraded for a generation that no longer believes in perfection.

But in all this… where is there room for the raw, the fragile, the un-monetizable? Can we still experience something without turning it into content? Can we still be clumsy, loud, intense, uncool—without it being a strategy?

Because as long as cringe remains a tool, a stance, an aesthetic… it will never again be a state of being. It’ll stay a packaged version of chaos. And we need that chaos. To create. To love. To feel without filters.

And maybe one day—when we stop presenting everything as a joke, when we accept that some things aren’t funny, that they’re just there, awkward and beautiful—maybe then, we’ll start saying something real again.

Emotional Burnout and the Age of Relentless Irony

After filtering everything through irony for so long, we’ve ended up switching off parts of ourselves. Not abruptly. Not dramatically. But in a slow, constant, insidious way. Like background noise that keeps emotions from ever fully settling.

For a while, we thought irony was a form of intelligence. A kind of clarity. A shield against cheesiness, melodrama, or emotional overload. And sometimes, it was true. Humor—especially in marginalized or precarious cultures—has always been a survival tactic. Laughing at yourself, twisting things, exaggerating: it’s a way to stay in control of your own narrative. But when that stance becomes a norm, a requirement, a deeply embedded cultural habit, it ends up dulling the very things it was supposed to protect.

Look at Stan accounts. They started out as loud, over-the-top fan pages, full of raw devotion. Teens who loved hard, who screamed “MOTHER IS MOTHERING” under every photo, who made fan edits bordering on religious worship. But then, the mockery began. People started laughing at Stans for being too emotional, too intense, too sincere. Even when it was touching, it got turned into a punchline. The result? Now even fans feel the need to act detached. They “stan” ironically. They tweet love declarations wrapped in 14 layers of memes and emoji overload. They love—but they can't let it show too much.

This emotional fatigue isn’t just affecting fandoms. It’s everywhere. It creeps into our relationships, our tastes, our posts, our reactions. It creates a constant paradox: we want connection, but we’re afraid of being taken seriously. We want to express things, but they have to be funny, fast, and instantly legible. The tragedy is—we still feel things. We just don’t know how to express them without performing.

We laugh at people who are too sincere like they’re aliens. Someone posts an honest breakup text? Cringe. Someone films a joyful moment with no filter, no music, no editing? Uncomfortable. Someone says they’re sad without layering it in sarcasm? Awkward. Because sincerity, these days, is scary. It means losing control. It demands real vulnerability—not the curated kind. It can’t be “rescued” by a funny caption.

And what this produces isn’t just a shift in aesthetics. It’s a shrinking of emotional experience itself. We end up not knowing what we really feel. After expressing joy as “LOLLLL” and sadness through cat gifs with tears, we lose depth. We lose texture. We stop moving through emotions—we stylize them. They become things to display, decorate, monetize.

This hits hardest for the most exposed generations—teens and young adults who grew up in a world of constant narration. The second something happens, it’s turned into content. Everything has to be documented, optimized, made “consumable.” What you live doesn’t really matter until it’s well said, well filmed, well edited. And in that process, raw emotion becomes… awkward. It doesn’t fit the frame. It slows the pace. It messes up the scroll.

A soft kind of cynicism sets in. Not the bold, black-hearted cynicism. A passive, almost sad kind. A way of not quite believing in anything anymore. Not out of principle—but out of exhaustion. The world is too fast, too dense, too unstable. So we protect ourselves. We deflect. We say, “I love this movie but I know it sucks.” “I like this song but it’s a guilty pleasure.” “I’m addicted to this drama, but don’t worry, it’s hate-watching.” We put bulletproof vests on our pleasures. We disclaim everything. As if loving something unironically was a reputational risk.

And yet—something still resists. In the cracks. You see those videos of teens singing off-key but with all their heart. Those awkward but genuine posts. Those moments when someone dares to say, “I think this is beautiful,” without adding, “I mean, maybe it’s dumb, I don’t know.” And when it happens—it’s like a breath of fresh air. Because it rings true. Because it reminds us of what we’ve lost.

So maybe the real question isn’t “can we still be sincere?” but: do we still dare to be? Because it means being vulnerable. Being mocked. Being misunderstood. Being seen—really seen. And that’s the vertigo. Not loving. Not feeling. But daring to do it without a filter.

In a world where everything is commentary, sincerity becomes an act of resistance. It’s more uncomfortable than cringe, more dangerous than mockery, more unstable than strategy. It has no backup plan. It can’t be explained. It can’t be monetized. It can only be lived.

And maybe that’s the fatigue we carry. Not the weight of always having to comment—but of never being able to just… be.

CONCLUSION — The Return of Emotional Courage

We live in an era where “cool” doesn’t mean much anymore. Where aesthetics replace sensation. Where emotion is allowed—as long as it’s disguised. And yet, somewhere in the midst of all this noise, there’s a crack forming.

Because many of us are tired. Tired of having to laugh at everything we love. Tired of adding a “lol” or a sarcastic gif to every feeling that actually touches us. Tired of not knowing if we truly adore something… or if we’ve just gotten used to performing the idea of it.

The real risk today isn’t having bad taste—it’s having sincere taste.

No, this episode won’t give you a miracle cure to unlearn irony. But it does ask a simple question: what if loving fully, awkwardly, excessively… was the most radical act left? What if the next cultural revolution isn’t about consuming differently, but feeling differently? No strategies. No packaging. No captions.

If something in this episode stirred you—if somewhere between the Babybel metaphors or the crying teen gifs you felt a strange resonance—you’re not alone. And more than that: you belong here.

Cappuccino & Croissant will keep doing what most other formats avoid. Talking about pop culture, yes—but also about what it does to our bodies, our emotions, our dreams.

If you want to support that mission—an independent, unapologetic, sometimes uncomfortable but always honest approach—you can join the podcast’s Patreon. It helps me keep my voice free, dig deep into topics, and say the things that don’t fit into sponsored briefs. You’ll also get exclusive content: readings from my books, behind-the-scenes thoughts, early access to episodes, and insight into everything I’m building—albums, novels, radio shows.

Speaking of which—if you liked this episode, I invite you to check out my last two EPs, En construction and Underconstruction. Two musical projects designed as emotional extensions of this podcast. Two sonic glitches in an overly polished world. They’re available on all streaming platforms.

And if you’re not sure where to start… start where it stings a little. Where it makes you uncomfortable. That’s usually the sign that something real is being said.