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I don’t think there is any more severe form of social ostracism than that meted out by freshly minted teens to their peers. Infractions against newly defined notions of cool are severely punished. Is there any more withering glare of contempt than the one directed at those who had the temerity to beat their own drum or, God forbid, wear the wrong shoe?
The shifting sands of popularity in the land of raging hormones and fraught emotions have been hard enough to navigate when the furthest your misdemeanors could travel was maybe one or two high schools over from your own, but now it’s a whole different ballgame of shame. Your troubles with the vibes of the moment could go viral. You could become a meme.
It’s not a fate you dream of. Sudden onset fame for all the wrong reasons. Yes, the youth all want to be influenzas and naturally gravitate to recording every moment of their curated lives to within an inch of spontaneity but that’s precisely the problem with the alternative outcome. You could lose control of the narrative.
Teenagers have always feared embarrassment. Social media has turned it into a global spectator sport.
I found Marelize, the girl who rides her bike into the rugby pole and whose mother’s succinct summary judgment: “O vok Marelize” is now national shorthand for well – almost any situation involving an entire open field and the capacity to home in on the singular element that will stop you in your tracks.
To be fair, Marelize sounded fine about the whole episode. Not scarred at all. But she’s also now living in America as a complete unknown, thereby putting a lot of distance between herself and her meme.
Can you ever really get away from this stuff, though? Yes, you grow up, but once scarred, always triggered, I say. Of course there is a teenage term for this particular quality of teenage misery - “Cringe mountain” - as in a very tall mountain of cringe, so tall as to be almost insurmountable and it’s making teens scared as shit.
It’s one thing fondly, albeit secretively, remembering your penchant for stupid teenage trends that swept up the school like marble or sticker season, but now requiring considerably more outlay. The short shorts, the leg warmers, the horrific stuff happening on your head masquerading as a trendy haircut. You’ve packed the shame of your manic adoption of the “trends” away into the back of the cupboard.
But you sometimes take it out, examine it and feel the hot flush of all those tricky emotions come welling up again. The need to fit in unobtrusively, the fear of sticking out like a total loser, the constant anxiety that you just don’t get it. That elusive thing the cool kids have and which you just can’t quite grasp. But it’s quite another level of teenage hell to have hard visual evidence mounting up in the case against you in the court of teenage opinion.
Apparently the teens are now afraid to dance lest someone films the incident and they find themselves banging their heads for eternity on a rugby pole.
It’s the problem with a visual medium powered with voiceover. Just ask me. One ridiculous TV show 12 or more long years ago and whenever someone sidles up to me with a knowing smile of recognition, I know it’s not because they read my weekly columns in the Sunday Times or Wanted magazine. It’s not because they take my yoga class or remember that time at school. No, it’s because I climbed the Cringe mountain and pinned my flag at the summit on Come Dine With Me, and it will live on forever like a 1,000-year-old Chinese egg. Quietly stinking out the place as it hardens into a fossilised rock of shame and regret.
I read somewhere that cringe can be described as an uncomfortable feeling that surges when in the presence of someone suffering socially. In other words, we kind of cringe together like a communal reflex to the person who does not get it, or tries too hard, or just tries and fails and so we all recoil a little at their failings and think “Oh dear, but thank goodness – there but for the grace of the style police go I.”
But now the cringe is worse because the collective opprobrium is potentially meted out on a global scale and so this new generation of teens already freighted with the classic symptoms of cringe are feeling understandably totally hamstrung. They would rather do nothing than climb the mountain. And so they are never going to stake their flag at the top, or come down the other side where the valley of original thought and individuation in all your cringeworthy glory may actually welcome them with abundance and creativity.
Shame, it’s so cringe hey?
Sunday Times
