Critiquing cringe

The battle over millennial cringe has reached a new peak. 

Across culture, the identification, rejection, and subsequent resurgence of anything that is judged to be too earnest is rife. Zoomers are obsessed with it - more than half say they’ve avoided expressing themselves freely online for fear of coming across as cringe.

Business Inside Correspondent, Katie Notopoulos, claimed that ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are “full of millennial cringe” because they overindex on terms such as chaotic and unhinged. While the ceaseless earnestness of such platforms can be grating, their tendency to desperately recycle old ideas in an effort to retain your interest surely gives more Gen Z energy.

Elsewhere, millennial cringe is apparently responsible for reshaping makeup trends as people attempt to avoid looking out of date, and is even being blamed for the demise of a chain of salad restaurants.

But nowhere is the obsession with what is and isn’t cringe more galling than the commentary around the new Anthony Bourdain film trailer.

GQ posed the question ‘Can Tony Make Anthony Bourdain Cool Again?’, a premise so absurd that it makes you genuinely worry for the next generation. Won’t somebody, please, think of the children.

Generations will always look at their elders and feel an acute sense of embarrassment. It’s coming for Gen Z, and they’ve given the Alphas plenty of ammo. But the rejection of millennial attitudes has always been more than that.

Recoiling from earnestness and authenticity in favour of misanthropic fatalism is a bulwark against a world that is too judgemental, too fractured, and often just too hard. 

It’s a perfectly natural reaction to the reality confronting Zoomers. But it’s also made them the loneliest generation on record. They, like literally everyone, could learn something from how Anthony Bourdain saw the world.