Cringe Is the Cop in Your Mind

I recently watched an episode of the always excellent Dropout.tv show Game Changer in which two grown men flew out to Kansas for a private improv show, localized entirely within their rental vehicle. The purpose? A very specific type of psychological torture, one so effective it had my wife laying flat on the floor as she attempted to avoid becoming the first black hole created by secondhand embarrassment. I, for the record, was fairing only marginally better

Cringe.

It may be one of the first complex emotions you can remember feeling. Hell, if you're me: a memory of cringing at yourself might be the oldest memory you have! It's so hardwired into us that I just cringed at myself when I realized I originally wrote "maybe" instead of "may be" in the first sentence of this very paragraph.

I'm not here to get overly scholarly about the physiology of the emotion or the interesting function it can serve in group settings. Much digital ink has already been spilled about the role of awkwardness as a kind of social sandpaper, grinding down the uneven edges of our personality that rules of conduct and etiquette leave unrefined.

My interest in cringe applies to the kind that we use to reject and resent our and others artistic impulses. The sort that leads to a person experiencing physical nausea at the act of a handful of grown adults in a car, barking like amped up Pomeranians in a (perhaps) misguided, but genuinely earnest attempt at entertaining strangers. The voice in our heads that polices the type of fun we should be having while we're just living in the moment.

Cringe is the cop in your mind, and ACAB should include it.

Let's be extremely clear: I cringe at a LOT of shit. I still can't watch The Office because Michael Scott causes me to do my best physical impression of a pillbug. I have some teenage memories that Guantanamo couldn't extract from me.

I'm not here to argue that cringing makes you a bad person, or even that a little internal cringe at amateurish art is an invalid response.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm here to say that all art is inherently kind of cringe, and that's fuckin’ awesome.

Artistic expression is emotional and a little egotistical and every single one of us has done it casually. Unless you're a robot, or worse, a person who prompts one to plagiarize you a shitty JPEG, you have made art.

If you've written crappy poetry, made the decision to turn the bathroom light off for your 10th mirror selfie, or thrown a little dried parsley from your spice cabinet onto a plate of reheated spaghetti before serving it: congrats, my friend, you've made a potentially interesting artistic contribution to someone's life!

Art is many contradictory things, and one of those is the attempt to share a moment, thought, or emotion. To capture it for a second, even if only for yourself. Especially great art might even challenge the audience to rethink something without explicitly prescribing a framework for them.

Yeah, I know: it's getting pretentious in here. Open a widow or something, we're almost done.

We undoubtedly live in a time, right now, that is both extremely judgemental of those who don't meet the threshold of “typical” and way more likely to put us in front of those who do for mockery and reinforcement of that standard.

There's a whole niche of the attention economy that thrives on reaction content and ragebait centered around both individuals and movements that challenge social hierarchy. Ideas that reject existing labels and structures in an attempt at living more honestly and freely.

Cringe is the framework used to shame expression that, left unchecked, might lead to you and others moving against the status quo and towards liberation.

The point of this negative mechanism is to reinforce the boundaries of who is “acceptable” and what is “degenerate”. It's always going to be easier to hold someone down if you convince them to stop trying to get up.

Art challenges you to go beyond that boundary, and even if it's cringe and amateur: it's radical as hell.

Write bad fanfiction for three devoted readers.

Cook weird food with your partner.

Meow at your friends in public places to make strangers think you're freaks.

Record an annoying song using that plastic recorder you got in elementary school. See if you can get your cool neighbor to play a Kleenex box as percussion for it.

Livestream yourself badly playing video games and chatting about life with strangers. (<--- Hey, it's me! I'm in this one!)

I've come around to the belief that it's good to be cringe, to delight in weird things to make yourself and others laugh. I'm finding value in seeing something odd and choosing to find the earnestness and artistic honesty in it.

I'm not doing the job of that bastard in my brain anymore.

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Sources/Inspirations

• The Cops In Our Heads: Some thoughts on anarchy and morality (editorial?)

• You're An Artist by Leadhead (video)

• Don’t listen to the cringe police — just be you (article)