SADLY,CRINGE ISEVERGREEN

Ocean Vuong was interviewed on ABC recently, expressing his concerns about cringe culture. His writing students are worried about appearing too earnest, he says, so they adopt a cynical approach to protect themselves. Vuong calls this affectation “horrifying,” and says that young people are in urgent need of sincerity, but are embarrassed when it’s “in the room.”

Because I am a cynic, I briefly wondered if this was a veiled reaction to recent criticism of his own work, particularly Tom Crewe’s scathing response to The Emperor of Gladness in The London Review of Books. Crewe is not a fan, and he doesn’t hold back. I spent a few years writing book reviews for the Globe and Mail, and once encountered a memoir by a highly celebrated writer who claimed that the disappearance of the bison on our plains was a mystery. I was so gobsmacked by this bold-faced revisionism I had to Google it, even though I’m Métis and I know our history, even though I have seen that photo of settler hunters standing on a mound of bison skulls a million times. I was so furious, my face went numb. I was much, much kinder to that writer than Crewe was to Vuong.

But it turns out this criticism of Vuong’s work isn’t new, when I Googled: Ocean Vuong earnest, I found conversations dating back a couple of years, asking him about the role of sincerity in his poetry. In a 2022 interview with the Guardian, he tells interviewer Lisa Allardice, “Young people want to be spoken to directly. They want to speak to each other directly.”

This did make me cringe, not because of its sincerity but because whenever anyone makes a broad statement about what young people want, I’m reminded of how online discourse has turned polite conversation into a distilled, simplistic, binary throwdown. But it’s not fair to judge this conversation on a single quotation. That’s also very popular lately. So I will focus on Vuong’s concern for his young students, and as a sometimes-teacher myself I have been following conversations about cringe culture, mostly led by young people since they’re the ones actually experiencing it, and mostly on YouTube. In fact, YouTuber mad is on just posted a video that attributes at least some of the responsibility for cringe culture to (now fallen) influencer Cody Ko, who would regularly post clips of teenagers being teenagers so he could laugh at them. Although the video is about Ko’s disastrous career trajectory, mad is on devotes a significant amount of attention to the nastiness of publicly shaming young people for just being themselves.

“…[W]e all go through different phases in life trying to be cool, trying on different hats to see what feels best…and everyone should have a certain level of freedom to be weird or quirky.”

I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment among YouTubers who are through their teen years but still young enough to remember the vast discomfort of coming-of-age on the internet. There’s actually pockets of great generosity in their community, dozens (hundreds?) of videos and TikToks dedicated to pushing back against cringe culture, and I bring this up not to discredit Vuong but to offer my fellow writing teachers a slightly wider view than what we’re seeing in Adult Media. A problem with treating every challenge of modernity as horrifying, it’s easy to ignore the good stuff that’s happening.

As a response to a social-concern-du-jour, “This isn’t new/ it’s always been like this,” is surely the most common and the silliest. Like most conversational motifs that annoy me, I didn’t notice how common it was until social media came along and bombarded us with banal conversations we wouldn’t have otherwise been privy to. And of course, “this isn’t new” is usually being passed from older to younger. As in:

Youthful, chronically online person: “Hey, I’m worried that people are attacking each other over Labubu dolls, frenzied over-consumption is a problem.”

Older, chronically online person: “This is nothing new, it was Cabbage Patch Kids back in my day.”

Okay, and? I came up through the Cabbage Patch Kids epoch and it hasn’t gifted me with any exceptional wisdom, except the knowledge that humankind is still depressingly vulnerable to marketing. In that case, I can offer some empathy to those who are about to watch the collectable toy cycle for another seventy or so years. Unfortunately, by the time you’ve seen it go around, nobody younger than you is going to care what you have to say.

What has changed since the Cabbage Patch days is the existence of the internet. A social panopticon erected from our own biases and fed by the media that still somehow manages to give the impression of real life. Surely all these discussions I see about Tide Pod eaters mean that the upcoming generation is doomed! I clicked on three stories last week, and now it’s Tide Pods all the way down. Avocado Toast! Hippies are coming for your middle-class comfort! And so on.

I joke, but I’m not immune to the algorithm’s call. The most recent one that got me was the crush of American plane crash stories (linking Dan Toomey’s Good Work here because it’s smart AND entertaining) that followed DOGE’s layoff spree. With no plans to fly anywhere, anytime, I still had a panic attack in my bedroom imagining a world where planes would be falling out of the sky. I feel very silly about that now, but fear (a common denominator in all these examples) makes it hard be rational.

So, the panic-inducing effect of the news cycle isn’t new, announcing the irreversible ruin of the current generation isn’t new, and the internet is overwhelming. Okay, and? Here’s what I’m going to suggest, those of us who are a little (or a lot) older have seen this before, so we have the ability to empathize. Empathy does not involve finger wagging. Maybe we’ve developed some tools for handling the years where being publicly uncool feels like THE worst case scenario. Maybe we understand that those in the throes of this period are unlikely to listen to our blowhard advice—however wise—but might appreciate knowing we’re standing beside them. A little quiet encouragement instead of lectures. And those of us who are writers know that this work is a never-ending cycle of being vulnerable, being judged, and being vulnerable again, so whatever they’re calling it now, cringe culture is this generation’s first opportunity to jump in, and our opportunity to give them their flowers.