Cringe
Date published: 2024.11.23
I’ve never been much of a Twitter person. Regardless of that, in the past there was a time when if you wanted to keep up with the Polish side of the Internet, you had to use either Facebook or Twitter; out of two evils, Twitter had always seemed more accessible and less insufferable to me. So I’ve had a Twitter account for years – an empty one, filled with only occasional retweets, but nonetheless a Twitter account. I still haven’t deleted it – many Polish people I follow haven’t yet switched to any other platform, so I open it every couple of days to check up on them.
I like to believe that my dislike of the platform and unwillingness to actually socialize on it beyond following people whose opinions I wanted to read made me more resistant to Twitter brainrot. I never replied under Tweets, I didn’t want to gain followers, I was only there to follow. But I’m not naive – I know damn well that even just by browsing, I inevitably must have internalised some parts of the god-awful culture.
Whatever I did manage to internalise from Twitter, though, doesn’t even hold a candle to the absolute brainrot I got from a decade spent on Tumblr. Especially late-stage Tumblr, after porn had already been banned. The time when people outside Tumblr started claiming it was already dead, and a lot of the social justice types of shitstarters moved to Twitter, leaving behind a breeding ground for TERFs and other types of radfems, but also terminally online cool kids.
On one hand, we were all better than the normies using more popular platforms or not using Internet at all; on the other hand, we were also better than the more stereotypically ‘online’ people, the quirky ones. A proper post-porn ban Tumblrina had some niche interests (she was not a normie!), but she was being intellectual about them. She had reclaimed the word ‘pretentious’; actually, everyone who wasn’t pretentious about their interests was a nerd who should be shoved into a locker. She had also reclaimed the r-word, as an insult against others of course. She was a cool nerd, and she was endearingly mean. She was either part of the minority of the userbase who partied, drank alcohol, had sex, etc. – or she was part of the majority that did not, but either way happily agreed with the minority that it was pathetic not to live her life this way. That she was a loser. But she was a cool loser, because she hung out with the cool Tumblr kids and she was aware and ironic about her loserdom. The proper post-porn ban Tumblrina was also usually a cisgender woman (and prone to every now and then reblogging suspiciously TERFy posts, but only occasionally), which is why I’m using she/her pronouns for her, but some of them were transgender, and their trans identity was not in any way an obstacle to being cool. Being a cool Tumblr user was a mindset, so as long as you didn’t respect literally anyone different from you, you were in.
I feel the urge to now dive into the Tumblr ecosystem and grab some screenshots of the culture I’m talking about, to present it all to you in its blinding glory. But while I am fairly certain I’m immune to most Twitter brainworms, and therefore it is safe for me to venture out there and screenshot some takes to illustrate my point, I am not in any way, shape, or form immune to Tumblr. This little essay is not worth losing sanity over. I am, as some would say, cowardly choosing not to step out of my safe space. I could dive into 4chan no problem, but Tumblr is where I draw the line – that’s how bad it used to be for my mental health.
(So instead you are going to get some screenshots from a recent Twitter thread about the idea of moving to Bluesky.)
I will always be Tumblr-brained to some degree. Not in the “everything relates to my fandom blorbos!” kind of way people tend to stereotype Tumblr users as, but in the “I keep using the term ‘fandom blorbos’ as an insult, because I have a deep-seated superiority complex over those annoying childish fangirls” way. You know, the uhh… cooler, brainworms? The brainworms that the majority of the Internet would now pat me on the back for, as if that was normal and not an absolutely deranged way to think?
Of course, what I’m describing about Tumblr is not unique to it at all. The specific flavour of it that I have experienced is, but the same phenomenon can be encountered almost everywhere on the Internet. It spreads out like cancer, corrupting Internet spaces to the point where it becomes impossible to successfully avoid it. Five years ago I was there, with other Tumblrinas, reblogging shitposts calling everyone to “bring back cringe culture” and “start shoving those nerds back into the lockers”. I did not stop to think that in my own life I had always been closer to being bullied rather than to having the chance to bully others, and therefore I would be the one shoved into a locker; on Tumblr I was cool, and my friends were cool, and if someone chose not to become Tumblr-cool and instead decided to remain pathetic, well then, that was all their fault, wasn’t it? Really, they deserved it.
Cringe culture will make you believe that being cringe is the worst thing one can possibly be, and progressive people are not immune to that skewed mindset at all. In a way, I almost think under right circumstances, we might be prone to it – if you feel helpless to change the world, if you lack the capability to punch the fascist, then at least bullying someone who’s even weaker than you will bring you a sense of accomplishment, won’t it? Then you’ll be someone, at least. And it’s not like you’re bullying them for no reason – Tumblr users certainly weren’t – often you’re bullying them because they’re doing the whole ‘being marginalized’ thing wrong, because they’re making normal people think your identity is a joke, because if they only were transgender/autistic correctly, everyone would have an easier time. Truly, you’re a fucking saint for all of this unpaid activism you’re doing in your free time.
You have to fight. You need to fight. What are you, if you’re not fighting someone?
❝Identity is maintained in struggle and dissatisfaction, in trying to fix what's wrong.
So we are constantly looking for what is wrong, constantly creating new crises so we can rise to the occasion. To ego, that's survival.
It is very important
that something be wrong
so we can continue to survive it.❞
Fragment of the book “There Is Nothing Wrong with You” by Cheri Huber.
When I was little, I used to hate everything my mother tried to make me interested in. She wanted a child who would be full of wonder, seeking magic in everything; unfortunately, her firstborn turned out to be unnaturally bitter and fun-hating from the very birth. Akademia Pana Kleksa (The Academy of Mr. Inkblot) was her favourite children’s book. To this day it is the one single piece of fiction that makes me irrationally disgusted whenever I think or hear about it.
Back then, when I was 5-or-so years old, I already knew: my mother was a cringe, delulu Disney adult who should be shoved into a locker. (I’m sorry.)
Now, my complicated relationship with my mother that inevitably developed into fucked up mommy issues in adulthood was obviously not black and white. I was not born perfectly designed to fall for the cringe culture mentality; I was a neurodivergent kid whose mother preferred the version of her child she had imagined rather than the one she got, a kid who was simultaneously lonely and misunderstood but also constantly praised for being more mature and smart than my peers, and so my little brain decided that if I couldn’t live up to my mother’s expectations of what childhood wonder should be like, then actually she was the stupid one.
So I decided that my mother was childish, more childish than me, and that everything she liked must have been bad by default. That led me, for example, to hate Lord of the Rings for the majority of my childhood and teenage years, even though LotR is objectively not a bad piece of fiction. I was never a big fan of Disney movies either, and I only ended up liking Harry Potter because the first movie had a big three-headed dog in it (I was obsessed with dogs), and later on, because HP fanfiction was my first entry into the world of queer fiction.
So of course, I can’t say I get along well with stereotypical millennials. Maybe part of that dislike is because I know that if I were one of them, my mother would have loved me more. I’m a stereotypical gen Z-er in this regard – I’ve made plenty of fun of millennials in my lifetime. Of course, nowadays I don’t give half a fuck about millennials being cringe anymore; I simply avoid talking with the ones who live and breathe their fandoms. I think they’re all fine as long as they don’t support a raging transphobe or anything along those lines, we just have nothing to talk about as potential friends.
But that’s because I’ve been doing my very best to purge all of the cringe culture brainrot from my head for a long time now.
Truth be told, I don’t know what the reason behind gen Z’s hatred towards millennials is. I specifically overshared about my mommy issues above so that you would understand where my dislike of millennial culture stems from; but somehow, I doubt that all Zoomers have mothers like mine and that they were all as unnervingly stiff and allergic to fun as I was at age 5. So the reason why all of my peers share this dislike is a complete mystery to me. Either way, one of the main pillars of the current cringe culture is gen Z’s burning hatred of millennials, for some goddamn reason.
Trying to explain to people so lost in the cringe culture mentality that being a millennial is not, in fact, a worse crime than being a white supremacist, is pointless. After all, they’re already at the point of admitting that they need the enemy; that they need the nazi to dunk on, to quote retweet, to make fun of. They need the enemy to be given platform, or else who will they fight? Who will be left for them to figh—
Wait.
But isn’t cringe culture already full of infighting in marginalised communities? Isn’t that what it does best? We’ve talked about this earlier. So why do they need the fascists to make fun of if they’re already well versed in making fun of other minorities—
(Because spaces that ban nazis are also less permissive of cyberbullying and abuse as a whole, so nazis are seen as the lesser of two evils in this scenario. Because it’s better to share a space with people wanting to hatecrime me rather than share a space with people I want to mistreat, but am not allowed to.)
The problem with being sarcastically cool and full of irony is that sometimes life forces you to face the more vulnerable, pathetic side of yourself whether you want to or not. Being terminally online is not your only character flaw, and neither can all of your weaknesses be transformed into something cool, actually. We’re all a bit pathetic. We’re all a bit uncool.
Taking part in cringe culture is like being slowly boiled in a pot. You repress the weakness that your community is currently making fun of, but subconsciously you know their hatred is directed at you anyways, even if you don’t understand how. You are pointing fingers at someone more similar to you than different and treating them like dirt under your shoe, or like evil incarnate. You internalise it. You hate yourself, you refuse to introspect, you can’t admit to yourself that you’re struggling with the same things as the people you used to ridicule, you refuse to seek help and community, because that community is cringe. You are the hunter – then why do you feel hunted?
It’s been long since I completely abandoned Tumblr, but I am still extremely sensitive to this mentality, and I still have to avoid many Internet spaces that I consider too unsafe for myself as of now. I spent a decade on Tumblr, and those were my entire teenage years; I still have years ahead of me to properly unlearn everything, to make myself more resistant to the brainworms.
There are thousands of people out there who are living in hell and don’t even know it. They’re not irredeemable, they’re not evil, they can change. You can change. Nobody is going to force you to start saying “heckin pupper” every other sentence, I promise, people only hope that you’ll stop wanting to destroy the people who sometimes do say it.
Life gets easier when you let go of this shame. Life gets easier when you accept sometimes there’s nothing you can do in your fight against your oppressors, and just take a break instead of punching down. Life gets easier when you lose the friends who were ready to start seeing you as an enemy the moment you were to show them any sings of cringe weakness. Life gets easier when you do your best to accept yourself, including the uncool, vulnerable version of you. I promise.
I hear the phrase “delete Twitter” everywhere. I agree, but we need to take it a step further: delete any platform that makes your brain feel like it’s being electrocuted. Delete Tumblr. Delete TikTok. Delete Instagram. Delete your Fediverse account. Whichever one gave you your specific kind of brainworms: get rid of it.
And then give yourself the time to patiently seek community somewhere else.
🌀