An examination of how two seemingly ordinary words became instruments of social conformity, political division and commercial insecurity, and why there are reasons to believe their influence can be challenged.
The Two Words That Changed the Conversation
Somewhere in the cultural transition between the optimistic promises of the late twentieth century and the increasingly self-conscious atmosphere of the twenty-first, two words acquired an extraordinary amount of social power.
The first was cringe. The second was woke.
Both words have legitimate meanings, interesting histories and contexts in which they can be used reasonably. Neither originated as an instrument of oppression. Yet their modern, frequently dismissive uses have contributed to a language of social inhibition that deserves closer examination.
One can be used to discourage people from expressing themselves freely. The other can be used to discourage people from expressing their openness towards others. Together, they have helped establish an atmosphere in which enthusiasm invites embarrassment and compassion invites suspicion.
Consider how casually these judgements now appear in everyday conversation. Someone openly celebrates a favourite film, an obscure hobby or an emotional artistic experience, and is called cringe. A school introduces children to families from different cultural backgrounds, a film includes a gay character, or an organisation makes a sincere attempt to address prejudice, and is accused of being woke.
The judgements are often delivered without any substantial explanation. Their brevity is part of their effectiveness. They appear to settle questions before a conversation has properly begun.
Calling something cringe can make another person suddenly conscious of how they appear. Calling something woke can make someone conscious of how their values might be perceived. Both encourage people to look over their shoulders before expressing an entirely ordinary aspect of their humanity.
The consequences are especially troubling because the qualities being discouraged are among the foundations of a decent society. Enjoyment, enthusiasm, curiosity, vulnerability and emotional openness allow people to build meaningful relationships with the world around them. Empathy, tolerance and willingness to understand unfamiliar experiences allow people to build meaningful relationships with one another.
These qualities require cultivation. They also require a certain degree of social permission.
Human beings have always mocked enthusiasm and resisted unfamiliar ideas. Cynicism, prejudice and conformity are older than any contemporary internet vocabulary. The difference today is the speed, repetition and reach with which dismissive judgements can circulate. An attitude once confined to a classroom, friendship group or television programme can now be reproduced across millions of screens, becoming part of the atmosphere in which people learn how to behave.
The internet once promised extraordinary opportunities for self-expression and communication. In many respects, it fulfilled that promise. It also created an environment in which self-expression became permanently visible, measurable and vulnerable to judgement.
The result is a peculiar contradiction. We possess more opportunities than ever to display our personalities, yet those opportunities often make us unusually anxious about displaying them.
We can encounter more cultures and ways of living than previous generations could readily access, yet the language surrounding those encounters is frequently organised around ridicule and suspicion.
I believe the widespread use of cringe and woke as dismissive labels offers a revealing way to understand this development.
The words themselves are symptoms of wider processes involving technology, politics, consumerism and human psychology. Their power comes from the social habits they reinforce. Those habits can be questioned. They can also be changed.
I. How ‘Cringe’ Became a Warning Against Enjoyment
The English word cringe has an older and more complicated history than its contemporary internet usage suggests.
It originally referred to a physical reaction, such as shrinking back, bending away or recoiling from something unpleasant. It subsequently acquired the familiar meaning of experiencing acute embarrassment or discomfort.
The feeling itself is perfectly natural.
Most people have remembered an awkward conversation years after it happened, or watched someone make an embarrassing mistake and instinctively looked away. There is even a recognised psychological phenomenon called vicarious embarrassment, sometimes described as second-hand embarrassment, in which observing another person's social discomfort produces an uncomfortable response in ourselves.
Research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has explored the neural processes involved in this experience. The investigators found that vicarious embarrassment involves systems associated with social pain, evaluation and understanding other people's mental states.
In other words, the underlying emotional experience is real. People genuinely can feel embarrassed on behalf of others.
But there is an enormous difference between experiencing embarrassment and using embarrassment as a method of social regulation.
When someone says that an enthusiastic person is cringe, the judgement frequently extends beyond a particular action. It can become an assessment of the person's character, intelligence, awareness or social standing.
The accusation implies that the individual has failed to recognise an unwritten rule about how openly they should display their feelings.
A person who cares too much is cringe. Someone who becomes visibly excited is cringe. A person who produces earnest art, writes emotional poetry, dresses unusually or expresses affection without irony is cringe.
The specific offence varies. The underlying expectation is strikingly consistent: maintain sufficient distance from your own feelings that nobody can accuse you of being naive.
There is something profoundly sad about this expectation.
Enthusiasm is one of the most accessible forms of human happiness. It does not require enormous wealth, expensive experiences or social recognition. A person can become absorbed in music, books, cinema, games, gardening, historical research or innumerable other interests because those subjects awaken something meaningful within them.
Enthusiasm makes the world larger.
Yet contemporary culture often encourages people to moderate their enthusiasm according to an imagined audience.
How excited is too excited? How intensely may someone admire an artist? How much emotional importance is it acceptable to attach to a fictional character? How openly can an adult express a passion that other people might associate with childhood?
These questions become especially exhausting when people begin asking them of themselves without any external prompting. The judgement has been internalised.
A person does not need to encounter an actual critic if they have already learned to anticipate the critic's response. They can abandon an idea, suppress an emotion or conceal an interest before anyone else has the opportunity to object.
This is how a vocabulary of ridicule can gradually become a system of self-censorship.
Of course, genuine embarrassment remains part of social life. People can behave inappropriately, act insincerely or make themselves the centre of attention in ways that reasonably create discomfort. Humour often depends upon recognising these situations.
The problem arises when the concept expands until ordinary sincerity itself becomes embarrassing.
An adult wearing a costume to a convention is not necessarily doing anything objectionable. Someone producing an amateur film, publishing an imperfect drawing or expressing devotion to an unfashionable band is not automatically displaying a deficiency of judgement. They are participating in culture.
The reflex to ridicule them may reveal considerably more about the observer's relationship with their own vulnerability than about the person being observed.
There is also an irony in the accusation. The individual expressing uncomplicated enjoyment may be acting with relatively little concern for social approval. The observer condemning that enjoyment may be intensely preoccupied with appearances, reputation and the possibility of being associated with something unfashionable.
The accusation of cringe can therefore be an extraordinarily self-conscious act. Sometimes the person supposedly embarrassing themselves is the only one in the interaction behaving freely.
II. The Psychology of Conformity
The social power of ridicule becomes easier to understand when examined alongside decades of research into conformity.
One of the most famous demonstrations came from psychologist Solomon Asch, whose experiments in the 1950s investigated whether individuals would contradict their own perceptions when confronted with a unanimous but incorrect group judgement.
Participants were asked to compare the lengths of lines. The task was deliberately straightforward, yet participants sometimes agreed with an obviously incorrect majority.
The experiment illustrated how strongly the desire to fit in can influence even relatively simple judgements.
There have been important qualifications and variations in subsequent research. Conformity depends upon context, group membership, confidence and numerous other factors. Nevertheless, the broader insight remains influential: other people's apparent agreement can exert pressure on an individual's willingness to express what they believe.
Contemporary social media expands the visible scale of that pressure.
Instead of encountering several classmates who disapprove of a particular interest, a person may encounter thousands of comments ridiculing it. The quantity of reactions can create the impression of overwhelming consensus, even when the comments come from an unrepresentative selection of users.
Popularity becomes confused with correctness. Ridicule becomes confused with insight.
A sarcastic response receiving thousands of likes can appear more socially authoritative than a thoughtful explanation receiving relatively little attention.
This creates a particular difficulty for creative expression. Creative work involves revealing something of oneself. Even apparently lighthearted activities require people to make choices, take risks and expose ideas that others may reject.
A 2022 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, by Sahoon Kim, Jack Goncalo and Maria Rodas, examined the psychological consequences of creative ideation. Across three preregistered experiments involving 740 participants, the researchers found that generating creative ideas increased feelings of autonomy while also increasing apprehension about being judged.
Creativity can make people feel freer while simultaneously making them more vulnerable.
A culture that repeatedly encourages fear of judgement may therefore discourage the very experimentation through which creativity develops.
Consider the early stages of becoming an artist.
An inexperienced musician will inevitably produce imperfect music. A young filmmaker may create awkward scenes. Someone learning animation may produce work that looks unintentionally strange. A writer's earliest attempts at emotional seriousness may seem excessive in retrospect.
These experiences are ordinary parts of learning. They become difficult when imperfection is treated as evidence that someone should never have tried.
Digital culture makes this danger particularly acute because experiments can survive indefinitely after the person responsible has developed beyond them.
A teenager's awkward video can be rediscovered years later. An inexperienced artist can become the subject of ridicule before they have acquired the technical ability to express what they intended.
The archive becomes a disciplinary mechanism.
People learn that attempting something publicly carries consequences far beyond the original moment. The safest strategy may appear to be never attempting anything sufficiently unusual to invite attention.
Yet this strategy carries an enormous collective cost. A world in which people feel safe only when repeating established conventions produces fewer surprises, fewer experiments and fewer opportunities for genuinely original expression.
The process is reinforced by another psychological phenomenon: the tendency to overestimate how closely other people are observing us.
Research on the spotlight effect has demonstrated that individuals often exaggerate the extent to which their appearance and behaviour attract other people's attention.
Social media complicates this tendency by providing genuine opportunities for public scrutiny. A person may be overestimating how much others care about their behaviour, but they also know that unexpected attention is technically possible.
The audience becomes both imaginary and potentially real. The resulting anxiety can persist even when no immediate threat exists. People begin composing their lives for spectators who may never appear.
III. The Commercial Value of Making People Self-Conscious
There is an economic dimension to this culture of embarrassment that deserves serious consideration.
Consumer capitalism has long relied upon creating desire, presenting ideals and offering products that promise to narrow the distance between a person's current circumstances and an imagined better life.
This is not inherently sinister. Advertising can help people discover useful products, enjoyable experiences and solutions to real problems. But commercial persuasion can also exploit insecurity.
If someone becomes dissatisfied with their appearance, possessions, lifestyle or social status, that dissatisfaction may make certain products more appealing. An industry does not need to invent every insecurity it profits from. Existing insecurities can be identified, magnified and repeatedly presented alongside commercial solutions.
The connection becomes especially visible in appearance-related marketing.
In 2021, Madelaine de Valle and colleagues published a series of meta-analyses in Body Image investigating social media exposure and body image. Their findings indicated that idealised appearance-related imagery could have negative effects on how people evaluated their bodies, although the effects varied according to study design and circumstances.
A systematic review published in 2022 similarly examined experimental studies of idealised imagery and body-positive content on social networking platforms.
These studies do not establish that all advertising deliberately manufactures insecurity. They do demonstrate that repeated exposure to idealised presentations can influence how individuals evaluate themselves.
The mechanism extends beyond physical appearance. One can feel inadequate about the attractiveness of one's home, the sophistication of one's hobbies, the quality of one's wardrobe, the destinations one visits or the apparent excitement of one's everyday life.
Social media introduces an almost limitless collection of comparison targets.
A person opening an application for entertainment may encounter several hundred demonstrations of apparently superior lives before closing it. Some displays are sincere. Others are carefully selected. Many are commercially motivated. Almost none provide a complete account of the individual's actual circumstances.
Yet comparisons can occur regardless of whether the observer consciously recognises the artificiality of what they are seeing.
A 2026 meta-analysis of online upward social comparison, drawing upon 54 independent samples involving 36,583 participants, reported an average association between upward comparison and poorer psychological outcomes. These included lower self-esteem and wellbeing, alongside higher levels of anxiety, depression and negative social-evaluative emotions.
The researchers emphasised substantial variation between studies and warned against simplistic causal conclusions.
That qualification matters. Social media does not affect everyone in the same way, and people already experiencing distress may be more likely to engage in harmful comparisons. Still, the findings help explain why an environment saturated with superior-looking alternatives can be emotionally difficult to navigate.
Now consider the role of cringe within this environment.
A person who fears being considered embarrassing may become more attentive to external standards of acceptability. They may worry about wearing the wrong clothes, enjoying the wrong entertainment, speaking in the wrong manner or participating in the wrong social activities.
These anxieties are not necessarily created by advertisers, but they provide fertile ground for commercial solutions.
The market can offer a more fashionable wardrobe, a more sophisticated lifestyle, a more impressive social identity or a supposedly more authentic version of the self.
A cycle emerges: external comparison creates discomfort, consumption promises relief, and further comparison reveals another perceived inadequacy.
The consumer becomes increasingly skilled at evaluating themselves from an imaginary spectator's perspective.
It is worth recognising how extraordinary this arrangement is. A person may spend money attempting to appear sufficiently relaxed, sufficiently spontaneous and sufficiently unconcerned with other people's opinions.
Even the performance of indifference can become a commercial product.
The carefully selected clothing that communicates effortless style, the meticulously designed home that appears naturally beautiful, and the supposedly candid photographs requiring substantial preparation all illustrate versions of the same paradox.
People are encouraged to work extremely hard at appearing as though they are not trying.
This process can also affect creativity. Someone who once enjoyed making something may begin asking whether the finished work is sufficiently marketable, aesthetically consistent or socially impressive.
An activity originally undertaken for pleasure becomes another opportunity for self-assessment.
The person who loved something because it made them happy gradually learns to evaluate whether loving it makes them look attractive.
This is one of the most troubling consequences of the contemporary culture of self-consciousness. It encourages individuals to relate to themselves as products.
IV. The Psychological Value of Being Yourself
The case against compulsive self-consciousness becomes stronger when we examine research into authenticity.
In 2020, Erica Bailey, Sandra Matz, Wu Youyou and Sheena Iyengar published a study in Nature Communications titled Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being.
The researchers examined information from 10,560 Facebook users, comparing their reported personalities with the personalities inferred from their online behaviour.
Individuals whose online presentation more closely reflected their self-reported personalities tended to report greater life satisfaction.
The researchers also conducted a smaller, preregistered longitudinal experiment in which participants were encouraged to post either authentically or in a more idealised manner.
Authentic posting was associated with improvements in immediate mood and affect, although the experiment did not establish an improvement in the more enduring measure of life satisfaction.
The findings suggest something valuable: how people use digital platforms may matter as much as whether they use them.
There can be psychological benefits to presenting oneself with a degree of honesty.
This is consistent with a simple observation from ordinary life. People generally experience greater freedom when they are not required to maintain an elaborate performance.
Friendships become more comfortable when individuals can admit ignorance, express enthusiasm, make mistakes and reveal unconventional interests without constantly anticipating disapproval.
Relationships built entirely around maintaining a socially desirable appearance are exhausting.
The problem with widespread ridicule is that it makes authenticity feel risky even in circumstances where no meaningful harm is involved.
Someone may conceal their affection for a particular film because its emotional sincerity has become unfashionable. Another person may avoid participating in a local artistic community because they fear being perceived as overly enthusiastic.
The immediate result might seem insignificant. One concealed hobby. One abandoned idea. One conversation never started.
Across millions of people, however, the cumulative effect could be substantial.
Communities depend upon individuals who are willing to initiate activities, organise gatherings, share unusual ideas and publicly care about things.
A culture that discourages visible enthusiasm may gradually undermine the social conditions that sustain these activities.
There is also a generational concern. Children frequently display enthusiasm without the layers of social calculation that adults acquire. They become excited about small discoveries, repeat favourite stories, invent elaborate games and show their feelings without carefully considering whether those feelings are fashionable.
Growing older necessarily involves learning social awareness and consideration for others. But social maturity should not require the systematic elimination of spontaneous enjoyment.
The ability to remain enthusiastic about life is not evidence that someone has failed to grow up. It may indicate that they have successfully preserved an essential part of themselves.
V. ‘Woke’: The Transformation of Awareness Into Suspicion
The history of woke is different from that of cringe, although their contemporary dismissive uses share a common capacity to discourage certain behaviours.
The word's social and political meaning developed within African American English, particularly in connection with awareness of racism and injustice.
The expression stay woke communicated the importance of remaining alert to discrimination and the realities facing Black communities.
Its history extends well before the contemporary political controversies surrounding it.
Blues musician Lead Belly used the expression in connection with the Scottsboro case in 1938. In 1962, writer William Melvin Kelley discussed the word in an article examining the adoption of Black American language by white speakers.
The expression subsequently gained wider public prominence through the Black Lives Matter movement and related discussions of racism and social justice.
Merriam-Webster added its contemporary definition in 2017, recognising its use to describe awareness of significant social and political issues, particularly racial and social justice.
The original meaning was straightforward. Remain aware. Pay attention. Recognise injustice.
There is nothing inherently unreasonable about those principles.
A society committed to fairness requires people to notice when others are treated badly. Democracies depend upon the ability to identify institutional failures, criticise unequal treatment and reconsider assumptions that have become normal.
Social progress frequently begins when someone recognises that an accepted condition is unnecessarily harmful.
Yet during the 2010s and 2020s, woke underwent a conspicuous transformation in political rhetoric.
The word became increasingly associated with a loosely defined collection of cultural practices, institutional policies, entertainment decisions and political attitudes.
Its negative usage often conveyed disapproval without identifying precisely what was objectionable.
A film might be called woke because its central character was a woman. Another might receive the label because it included a same-sex relationship. A company might be accused of wokeness for acknowledging racial inequality, while a school might receive the same criticism for introducing material about different cultural traditions.
Other accusations involved more specific objections to institutional policies, ideological conformity, corporate messaging or restrictions upon freedom of expression.
The problem was that these extremely different circumstances were frequently compressed into one label.
The word became capable of referring to almost anything a particular audience already disliked.
Political communication benefits from this ambiguity.
A speaker can invoke an emotionally charged term without explaining whether they oppose discrimination, dislike a particular educational method, object to commercial virtue-signalling or disagree with a specific public policy.
The listener supplies their own interpretation.
The conversation becomes organised around feelings of cultural allegiance rather than the particular merits of an argument.
Linguist Tony Thorne, speaking to PolitiFact in 2023, described the term's evolution into a general condemnation of political opponents.
The same investigation emphasised that different speakers assign different meanings to the word, making it difficult even to interpret polling about attitudes towards wokeness.
This is a revealing problem.
When a political term becomes so elastic that people cannot agree on its meaning, its principal function may increasingly involve establishing who belongs to which side.
It becomes a social signal. And once the signal is sufficiently familiar, people may respond before considering the underlying issue.
VI. When Decency Became Something to Defend
One of the more disturbing consequences of the pejorative use of woke is the way it can make ordinary expressions of social acceptance appear ideologically suspicious.
Consider a parent who wants their children to grow up comfortable around people from different backgrounds.
The parent may want them to understand that families can have different religions, languages, ethnic histories and structures. They may hope their children will treat gay classmates with the same respect they extend to anyone else.
These ambitions require no elaborate political theory. They arise from a relatively simple ethical commitment: other people's differences should not automatically make them less deserving of dignity.
Yet the vocabulary of cultural conflict can transform these everyday values into supposed evidence of ideological extremism.
An inclusive classroom becomes a political controversy. A diverse fictional cast becomes a battlefield. A company's acknowledgement of a minority group is interpreted as an aggressive statement rather than a potentially ordinary act of recognition.
The emotional effect can be subtle.
People may begin wondering whether expressing uncomplicated acceptance will make them targets of ridicule or accusations of political conformity.
This anxiety is particularly unfortunate because cultural openness depends partly upon everyday behaviour.
A person does not need to produce a manifesto to contribute to a tolerant society. They can simply welcome a neighbour, show curiosity about another culture, use someone's preferred name or refuse to participate in a cruel joke.
Such behaviour becomes more difficult when the surrounding environment treats empathy as a suspicious performance.
There is a broader political danger here. Once the expectation of kindness is reframed as something excessive, a person may find themselves defending attitudes that previously seemed ordinary.
Why should a multiracial group of characters require a special justification? Why should acknowledging the existence of gay people automatically turn a children's story into a political statement? Why should treating cultural difference as normal be regarded as an attempt to impose an ideology?
These questions do not eliminate the need for serious discussion about education, artistic choices, institutional policies or competing rights.
Reasonable disagreement remains essential.
A school curriculum can be criticised for accuracy, age suitability or teaching methods. Corporate diversity campaigns can be questioned for hypocrisy. Creative works can be evaluated for narrative quality, characterisation and artistic merit.
The presence of diversity does not automatically establish excellence.
But criticism becomes intellectually impoverished when the mere presence of difference is treated as sufficient evidence of failure.
The accusation of wokeness can sometimes discourage the very examination it claims to encourage.
Instead of asking whether a particular portrayal is truthful, meaningful or well executed, people are invited to judge whether it belongs to a disliked political category.
The result is a loss of curiosity.
People become less interested in what something actually communicates and more interested in what cultural faction it supposedly represents.
VII. What We Remember About the 1990s
There is a particular sadness in comparing this atmosphere with the cultural possibilities many people remember from the 1990s.
For those who grew up during that decade, popular culture frequently presented a sense of expanding horizons.
The Cold War had ended. Global communication was becoming increasingly accessible. International exchange seemed capable of bringing distant societies into closer contact.
The developing internet appeared to promise a future in which geographical boundaries would become less restrictive and individuals could discover communities built around shared interests.
Multiculturalism was a prominent aspiration in many Western countries, including Australia.
Children encountered television programmes in which friendship groups included people from different backgrounds. Animated series presented teams whose members represented different cultures. Educational programming encouraged curiosity, cooperation and respect for others.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which began in 1990, offered a particularly literal representation of international cooperation. Its protagonists came from different parts of the world and worked together to address environmental problems.
The series was earnest, educational and occasionally unsubtle. It was also comfortable presenting the idea that young people from different cultures could cooperate for a common good.
The fact that such an uncomplicated message might now be dismissed by some audiences as woke reveals something about the changes in our vocabulary.
Other programmes conveyed similar aspirations through humour, science fiction, family entertainment and ordinary storytelling.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, which concluded in 1994, inherited an earlier vision of humanity moving beyond many contemporary divisions. Its imagined future remained imperfect, but its underlying aspiration was recognisable: reason, cooperation and curiosity could help people overcome prejudice.
That optimism mattered even when it exceeded the realities of the time.
Popular culture has always offered opportunities to imagine societies more generous than the ones in which audiences currently live.
The 1990s also witnessed important developments in the representation of gay people.
Films such as Philadelphia in 1993 and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994 brought different aspects of gay experience to mainstream audiences.
Ellen DeGeneres's public coming out in 1997, alongside her television character's coming out, became a major cultural event.
Will & Grace, beginning in 1998, subsequently placed openly gay characters at the centre of an internationally successful network sitcom.
These developments were complicated, contested and frequently accompanied by backlash. Nevertheless, they contributed to the expanding visibility of people who had often been marginalised or represented through stereotypes.
The broader atmosphere contained a genuine sense of possibility.
A child watching television could encounter friendships across cultural boundaries, environmental cooperation, imagined international institutions and stories suggesting that previously excluded people belonged within ordinary social life.
The message was inconsistent, imperfect and sometimes contradicted by other programming. But it existed.
There was cultural space for the possibility that humanity might become more accepting as it became more connected.
For many people, that expectation formed part of the emotional character of the decade.
The future seemed likely to involve extraordinary technologies, expanding knowledge and greater opportunities for people to understand one another.
The promise was never guaranteed.
Looking back now, however, one can understand why the contemporary habit of dismissing enthusiasm as cringe and inclusion as woke can feel like a betrayal of that earlier optimism.
The vocabulary appears to have turned against some of the very qualities the future was supposed to cultivate.
VIII. The 1990s Were Never a Golden Age
Nostalgia becomes less useful when it erases the injustices that existed alongside the optimism.
The 1990s were not universally accepting, particularly towards gay people, racial minorities, immigrants or others who experienced entrenched discrimination.
The American military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy emerged in 1993. The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996. In 1998, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming, becoming one of the most widely recognised victims of anti-gay violence in American history.
The HIV/AIDS crisis had already exposed extraordinary levels of stigma and political neglect.
In Australia, the decade contained persistent discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, continued struggles for reconciliation and serious controversies surrounding immigration and national identity.
The 1997 Bringing Them Home report exposed the devastating history of the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families.
The decade also witnessed the rise of political movements that challenged multiculturalism.
These realities should remain central to any honest historical assessment.
The optimism worth preserving was an aspiration towards greater inclusion, not a claim that inclusion had already been achieved.
Indeed, the measurable progress that followed demonstrates why social openness deserves to be defended.
Gallup polling found that only 27 per cent of Americans supported legal recognition of same-sex marriage in 1996.
By 2022 and 2023, support had reached 71 per cent.
The figure subsequently declined to 65 per cent in Gallup's 2026 survey, illustrating both the extraordinary transformation over three decades and the possibility that progress can experience reversals.
Attitudes towards interracial marriage offer another revealing comparison.
In 2021, Gallup found that 94 per cent of Americans approved of marriages between Black and white people. Earlier generations had expressed considerably lower levels of approval.
These changes occurred through a complicated mixture of activism, political organising, legal reforms, personal relationships, education, generational replacement and cultural representation.
No single television programme or political slogan produced them.
The overall movement nevertheless demonstrates that social attitudes can change dramatically.
People can become more accepting. Prejudices once considered normal can lose their authority.
Forms of recognition that previous generations debated intensely can become everyday features of social life.
That history provides a foundation for hope.
It also illustrates why the contemporary backlash against inclusion deserves scrutiny.
A society that has made substantial progress can still experience political movements seeking to reverse or discredit those gains.
The language of woke becomes consequential when it helps portray hard-won forms of social recognition as unnecessary, threatening or embarrassing.
The danger is not that everyone using the term opposes equality. People use it in markedly different ways.
The danger is that an imprecise accusation can make hostility appear more reasonable than it deserves to be.
IX. The Internet's Transformation of Public Emotion
The relationship between these two words and modern digital culture cannot be understood without examining the incentives governing online attention.
Commercial social media platforms compete to retain users, encourage engagement and generate revenue.
Their systems reward content according to measurable behaviours, including viewing, clicking, reacting, sharing and commenting.
These measurements are useful for determining what attracts attention. They do not necessarily establish what contributes to human wellbeing.
Something can be highly engaging because it is meaningful, informative, beautiful or funny. It can also be engaging because it makes people angry, frightened, contemptuous or anxious.
The system has no inherent reason to treat those emotional responses as morally equivalent or socially beneficial.
Research suggests that certain negative emotions can be especially effective at attracting attention.
A 2023 paper in Nature Human Behaviour, titled Negativity drives online news consumption, examined a large collection of experimental variations in online news headlines.
Across material involving approximately 105,000 headline variations, 5.7 million clicks and more than 370 million impressions, the researchers found that negative language increased engagement.
For an average-length headline, adding a negative word increased the click-through rate by approximately 2.3 per cent.
Positive language produced the opposite tendency.
These findings concern news headlines, not the entire structure of online culture. They nevertheless demonstrate why publishers operating under competitive attention incentives may gravitate towards negative framing.
Another study, published in Science Advances in 2021, investigated moral outrage on Twitter.
William Brady and colleagues analysed millions of posts and conducted behavioural experiments examining how social feedback influenced subsequent expression.
They found that positive feedback for outrage increased the likelihood of future outrage expression.
Users also adapted their behaviour to the expressive norms of their online communities.
This provides a psychologically plausible explanation for the intensification of certain forms of digital hostility.
When outrage receives attention, the behaviour can be reinforced. When a community repeatedly expresses outrage, newcomers may learn that outrage is the expected response.
The process does not require a central authority instructing everyone to become angrier. The incentives themselves help establish the norm.
Another study, published in 2021 under the title Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media, examined approximately 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts from American political figures and news organisations.
Posts referring to political opponents attracted substantially greater engagement than posts discussing the author's own political group.
Across the analysed material, posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted approximately twice as often.
The findings suggest that hostility towards outsiders can become commercially valuable within attention-driven systems.
This offers a useful explanation for the contemporary success of dismissive labels.
Cringe can provide an immediate social target. Woke can provide an immediate political target.
Both allow complex circumstances to be reduced to emotionally recognisable categories.
A person displaying enthusiasm becomes an object of ridicule. An institution displaying concern about discrimination becomes an object of ideological suspicion.
The audience does not have to consider the full circumstances.
It can simply recognise the label, experience the associated emotion and participate in the response.
This pattern encourages what might be called reflexive contempt.
The judgement becomes quicker than the thought.
And when millions of people repeatedly encounter the same reactions, those reactions can begin to feel like ordinary common sense.
X. Two Forms of Social Inhibition
The similarities between the contemporary uses of cringe and woke become especially striking when their underlying social mechanisms are considered.
Both terms can transform an ordinary behaviour into something the individual must defend.
The person expressing enthusiasm is asked to justify why they care.
The person expressing acceptance is asked to justify why they are being inclusive.
In each case, the burden of explanation shifts towards the person displaying a broadly constructive quality.
The resulting inhibition operates through anticipated judgement.
Someone may hesitate before publicly praising an emotional film because they expect a dismissive response.
Someone else may hesitate before expressing support for an inclusive initiative because they anticipate accusations of ideological conformity.
The hesitation itself is consequential.
A thought remains unspoken. A gesture of encouragement is withheld. A creative idea never reaches its audience.
Over time, individuals may begin treating these omissions as ordinary social intelligence.
They learn to remain detached, to qualify their enthusiasm and to surround expressions of care with enough irony that they cannot easily be accused of sincerity.
The pattern is especially visible in the use of disclaimers.
People announce that they know something is silly before admitting they enjoy it.
They apologise for becoming emotional.
They describe their own interests as embarrassing before anyone else has had the opportunity to criticise them.
These habits can serve perfectly legitimate social purposes. Self-deprecating humour can be charming and disarming.
But when every expression of sincere enjoyment arrives accompanied by an apology, the pattern suggests a deeper discomfort with emotional openness.
A similar dynamic affects public discussions of tolerance.
Someone expressing support for a marginalised community may feel compelled to demonstrate that they are not excessively ideological, insufficiently independent or naively accepting of every institutional policy.
Qualification can be intellectually valuable when it introduces genuine nuance. It becomes socially restrictive when people feel required to establish their distance from compassion before they are permitted to express it.
The shared mechanism is the fear of association.
A person worries that enjoying something will place them within an embarrassing category. Another worries that supporting someone will place them within a politically discredited category.
The labels therefore influence behaviour even when nobody explicitly utters them.
This is a familiar feature of social norms. Once people understand what their community rewards and punishes, they can adjust their conduct without being directly instructed.
The words become shorthand for broader expectations.
In this sense, they resemble command words, capable of producing an immediate social reaction.
The comparison with the fictional conditioning of The Manchurian Candidate is tempting because of the apparent automaticity.
But the real process requires no literal psychological programming.
Repeated exposure, social reinforcement and the ordinary human desire for acceptance provide a sufficient explanation.
The outcome may be quieter than dramatic brainwashing, but it can still be damaging.
People gradually learn to suppress parts of themselves.
XI. The Spiral of Silence
Political communication research offers another way of understanding how social judgements become self-reinforcing.
The spiral of silence describes a process in which individuals become reluctant to express opinions they believe are unpopular.
As people with apparently minority views remain silent, the dominant position may appear even more widely supported.
This can discourage further disagreement, reinforcing the original perception.
The phenomenon predates the internet.
Digital platforms, however, make visible social approval and disapproval in unusually concentrated forms.
A 2014 Pew Research Center investigation examined Americans' willingness to discuss Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance.
The research surveyed 1,801 adults and found substantial differences between willingness to participate in face-to-face discussions and willingness to discuss the subject on social media.
Approximately 86 per cent were willing to discuss the issue in person, while 42 per cent of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms.
People were also less willing to express their views when they believed their online contacts disagreed with them.
The study could not establish that social media caused people to become silent. It nevertheless demonstrated that digital communication had not eliminated the pressures associated with perceived disagreement.
Indeed, online networks could make some users more conscious of conflicting views within their social circles.
This matters enormously for the relationship between public rhetoric and private belief.
A person scrolling through hostile comments may assume that the people producing those comments represent the prevailing social attitude.
They may then remain silent despite privately disagreeing.
Other people observing the same conversation may reach the same conclusion.
A minority of highly active participants can consequently create the appearance of a much larger consensus.
Consider what this means for somebody who enjoys something widely mocked online.
If they see only ridicule, they may assume that nobody else shares their affection.
They may conceal their interest.
Other people with the same interest may do likewise.
The community becomes invisible to itself.
The political equivalent is equally concerning.
A person who supports an inclusive policy may encounter a sufficiently hostile discussion to believe that their position has become socially unacceptable.
They may refrain from commenting.
Other supporters may interpret the resulting silence as evidence that their values are no longer widely shared.
These are plausible applications of the spiral-of-silence framework. They are not proof that either particular word has caused measurable population-wide changes.
Still, the mechanism helps explain why language matters.
A society can possess more tolerance than its public arguments suggest.
Its members may simply have become reluctant to demonstrate that tolerance.
XII. The Problem of Mistaking Loudness for Consensus
There is empirical evidence that people can systematically misunderstand the attitudes of those around them.
A particularly revealing example appeared in Nature Communications in 2022.
Researchers examined Americans' perceptions of public support for major climate policies.
The study involved a representative sample of 6,119 adults.
It found that approximately 66 to 80 per cent of Americans supported the examined policies, yet respondents estimated support at only about 37 to 43 per cent.
Between 80 and 90 per cent of respondents underestimated how many other Americans were concerned about climate change or supported action.
The researchers described this as a form of pluralistic ignorance, in which people collectively misunderstand what others believe.
This finding has implications extending far beyond environmental policy.
Public perception is not a transparent reflection of public opinion.
People may construct their understanding of society from highly visible arguments, prominent personalities, media framing and the behaviour of particularly vocal minorities.
The apparent cultural atmosphere can therefore differ substantially from what people actually believe.
This is one reason I resist the temptation to conclude that humanity has simply become less compassionate.
What we encounter online is not necessarily a representative sample of human behaviour.
The most hostile person in a discussion may be more visible than hundreds of people who quietly disagree.
The sarcastic commentator may attract more attention than the neighbour who spends an afternoon helping someone move house.
A divisive political slogan may circulate more widely than a friendship that crosses cultural boundaries.
The internet makes certain aspects of human conduct extremely visible while leaving others comparatively obscure.
This imbalance can distort our sense of the world.
It may cause people to underestimate how much ordinary kindness survives.
It can also make cynicism appear more sophisticated than it is.
The assumption that everyone is secretly selfish, hostile or foolish may be comforting to people who fear disappointment.
It is nevertheless an empirical claim, and a frequently poorly supported one.
Human beings remain capable of cooperation, generosity and collective achievement.
The problem is that these behaviours do not always produce the kinds of spectacular emotional responses that commercial attention systems are designed to reward.
A person can spend several hours scrolling through hostility and conclude that society is disintegrating, even while living among neighbours who generally manage to coexist peacefully.
This does not mean that online hostility is imaginary or that political threats should be dismissed.
It means that visibility and prevalence are different things.
The distinction creates an opening for hope.
If part of our pessimism arises from misunderstanding what others believe, then improved communication and more accurate information about social norms may help correct it.
We may be surrounded by more potential allies than we realise.
XIII. The Limits of the Argument
A serious examination of this subject must acknowledge several objections.
The first is that neither word is exclusively destructive.
Cringe can describe genuine discomfort with inappropriate or manipulative behaviour. People sometimes recognise insincerity, dishonesty or social misconduct through feelings of embarrassment. Such judgements can be reasonable.
Similarly, criticism of practices described as woke can sometimes involve substantive concerns.
Institutional diversity programmes may be poorly designed. Corporate campaigns may exaggerate commitments they do not meaningfully uphold. Educational materials may contain inaccuracies. Political movements can become rigid, punitive or intolerant of reasonable disagreement.
These possibilities deserve examination on their own merits.
The problem with vague labels is that they often replace this examination.
Calling an advertisement woke does not explain whether it is dishonest, artistically unsuccessful or socially objectionable.
Calling a person's artistic work cringe does not explain whether its humour fails, its execution is weak or its emotional expression simply makes the observer uncomfortable.
Good criticism makes distinctions. Contempt tends to erase them.
The second objection concerns causation.
It would be inaccurate to claim that two words independently produced contemporary social polarisation.
Political conflict has multiple causes, including economic insecurity, institutional mistrust, changing media environments, unequal power, historical prejudice and conflicts over national identity.
Likewise, insecurity and fear of embarrassment existed long before social media.
The evidence presented here identifies mechanisms through which particular kinds of language may reinforce social inhibition.
It does not prove that the popularity of the words directly caused declining happiness, increased prejudice or widespread changes in personality.
A third objection concerns the idea of naturally occurring joy.
Human enjoyment is shaped by culture, personality, upbringing, material circumstances and countless other influences.
There was no historical period in which everyone possessed an identical level of spontaneous happiness.
Yet it remains reasonable to argue that social environments can encourage or discourage particular expressions of enjoyment.
A society can make it easier to display enthusiasm. It can also make doing so socially costly.
The same is true of empathy.
Human beings possess capacities for cooperation and understanding, but those capacities are influenced by norms, institutions and relationships.
They require opportunities to develop.
My argument is therefore concerned with the cultural conditions under which positive human qualities are expressed.
The central question is whether contemporary language has made certain valuable behaviours unnecessarily difficult.
XIV. The Age of the Influencer, and Its Possible Decline
The contemporary influencer economy provides a particularly revealing expression of these pressures.
Influencers occupy a complicated position in digital culture.
Many are talented artists, entertainers, educators, journalists, researchers or specialists who have successfully developed direct relationships with audiences.
Their work can be valuable, independent and genuinely creative.
Others operate primarily through commercial self-presentation, cultivating aspirational identities that are sustained through brand relationships, product recommendations and carefully managed visibility.
The difference matters.
A person producing thoughtful cultural commentary or sharing specialised knowledge is participating in public life in a recognisable way.
A person whose principal commercial activity involves persuading others to emulate their lifestyle operates within a different set of incentives.
The broader system has often blurred these distinctions.
Audiences are encouraged to perceive commercial recommendations as extensions of intimate personal relationships.
Advertisements are integrated into supposedly ordinary conversations.
The boundaries between friendship, entertainment, self-improvement and marketing become increasingly difficult to identify.
The result is an unusually personal form of consumer persuasion.
Traditional advertising might present a celebrity endorsing a product.
Influencer marketing can present a seemingly accessible individual explaining how the product improved their everyday life.
The commercial message arrives wrapped in familiarity.
This helps explain why influencer culture became so powerful. It also helps explain why some audiences are increasingly sceptical.
Morning Consult's 2025 influencer marketing research reported a decline in trust among social media users compared with the previous year.
A Gartner survey of 1,006 American consumers, conducted in May and June 2026, found that 35 per cent said they relied less on influencers for shopping information and recommendations because of the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence.
The same research found that 43 per cent reported relying more on real people for recommendations in response to the expansion of AI-generated content.
These results suggest a degree of dissatisfaction with the increasingly manufactured character of online persuasion.
Artificial intelligence adds another layer of uncertainty.
Audiences must now consider whether the person presenting a product is genuine, whether the images have been manipulated, whether the recommendation is authentic and whether the content has been generated primarily to attract engagement.
The artificiality that was once merely suspected has become technically easier to produce.
The commercial model is encountering a credibility problem.
Yet predictions of the influencer economy's immediate collapse would be premature.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau projected American creator advertising expenditure of approximately $44 billion in 2026, following substantial growth in previous years.
The industry remains commercially significant.
The more defensible prediction is that its cultural authority may change.
The polished presentation of an apparently perfect life may become less persuasive as audiences grow more accustomed to recognising the machinery behind it.
The language of authenticity may itself become increasingly difficult to commercialise convincingly.
An interesting development is the rise of de-influencing, a practice in which creators encourage audiences to reconsider purchases, avoid unnecessary products or question commercial recommendations.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Business Research, drawing upon fifteen interviews, examined how audiences interpreted de-influencing as a potentially more responsible form of consumer communication.
The sample was small, but the research identified associations with authenticity, reduced consumption and resistance to unrealistic standards.
A separate 2026 study reported experimental evidence that audiences could perceive de-influencers as more credible than traditional influencers.
These developments deserve attention because they suggest that at least some consumers are becoming interested in advice that helps them resist commercial pressure.
There is an obvious complication. De-influencing can itself become an influencing strategy.
Someone can establish a commercial identity around persuading people not to purchase things, eventually attracting sponsorships and new forms of monetisation.
The market is remarkably adept at incorporating criticism of itself.
Nevertheless, the underlying dissatisfaction may be genuine.
More people are becoming aware that an online personality's apparent intimacy does not guarantee independence.
More people recognise that manufactured perfection is often a business strategy.
And more people appear willing to question whether constant exposure to aspirational lifestyles is actually improving their lives.
The possible end of the influencer age should therefore be understood as the weakening of a particular cultural ideal.
The ideal that other people's curated lives represent standards against which our own lives should be judged.
The ideal that every personal interest should become a brand.
The ideal that authenticity requires public recognition.
The ideal that a worthwhile life must be continuously documented and successfully marketed.
Those assumptions deserve to lose their authority.
If their influence diminishes, the consequences could be liberating.
People might rediscover the pleasure of doing things without audiences.
They might become less concerned with whether their interests appear fashionable.
They might begin evaluating experiences according to whether those experiences enrich their lives rather than whether they generate attractive content.
And perhaps they might become less willing to ridicule the uncomplicated happiness of others.
XV. A Small Conversation With Adam Sessler
I recently had a brief opportunity to raise aspects of this concern with Adam Sessler on his Twitch programme, The Joy of Sess, during the episode titled Heroes: Do We Have Them?
For those familiar with video game journalism and criticism, Sessler occupies an interesting place in the history of the medium.
His work became widely recognised during a period when video games were developing into a major cultural form, and when mainstream discussion of games was still establishing its conventions.
The broader history of games criticism offers an instructive example of the relationship between enthusiasm and self-consciousness.
Many people who grew up playing games encountered a world of extraordinary imagination.
Games encouraged curiosity, experimentation and emotional investment. They provided experiences that could feel intensely personal while also connecting people across countries and cultures.
The medium also attracted ridicule.
Adults who enjoyed games were sometimes portrayed as immature. Emotional investment in fictional characters could be treated as embarrassing. Enthusiasm for fantastical worlds was not always regarded as intellectually respectable.
Over time, the cultural standing of games changed dramatically.
The medium developed more sophisticated critical traditions, expanded its audiences and gained recognition as an important artistic and commercial form.
Yet the old impulse to ridicule earnest enthusiasm never entirely disappeared.
Digital culture has frequently reproduced it in new ways.
Games can become objects of intense factional conflict, with audiences encouraged to interpret artistic decisions through political categories before considering their creative intentions.
The pleasure of discussing games can become entangled with the perceived obligation to demonstrate allegiance to particular communities.
This is one reason I find the broader questions surrounding The Joy of Sess worthwhile.
The programme provides an occasion to consider not only particular entertainment products, but the ways people develop relationships with culture.
My own contribution to the conversation was modest. I raised the concern that contemporary online culture has encouraged forms of self-consciousness and cynicism that interfere with people's ability to enjoy things openly.
It is an idea I have continued thinking about.
I do not claim that a brief exchange on a livestream established any definitive conclusions.
The value of raising the subject lies in encouraging further discussion.
Why have we become so comfortable ridiculing enthusiasm?
Why do so many people appear determined to identify the cultural affiliations of an artistic work before deciding whether they enjoy it?
Why do adults increasingly need to justify the simple fact that something makes them happy?
These questions extend far beyond video games.
They concern the relationship between criticism and enjoyment itself.
Good criticism can deepen appreciation.
It can identify weaknesses, challenge complacency and help audiences better understand the experiences they value.
But a critical culture that becomes primarily concerned with displaying superiority may gradually lose its relationship with the pleasures that originally justified its existence.
At some point, criticism must remember what it is for.
The purpose of taking art seriously should include the possibility of loving it seriously.
That does not require abandoning judgement. It requires remembering that judgement and enjoyment are compatible.
I hope the conversation continues, both through programmes such as The Joy of Sess and through ordinary discussions among people who care about culture.
Because the problem is larger than any particular industry.
It concerns whether we are still comfortable allowing ourselves to feel things.
XVI. Why Optimism Remains Reasonable
The historical and psychological evidence offers reasons to resist fatalism.
One of the strongest is that social attitudes are not fixed.
The extraordinary changes in public acceptance of interracial marriage and same-sex relationships demonstrate that beliefs can evolve over decades.
These changes were frequently achieved despite loud opposition.
People challenged prejudices, established relationships across social boundaries, shared their experiences and created institutions capable of protecting rights that previous generations had denied.
The process was incomplete and contested. It nevertheless produced measurable progress.
Research into intergroup contact provides another reason for optimism.
In 2006, psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp published a major meta-analysis examining whether contact between members of different social groups reduced prejudice.
The analysis covered 515 studies and 713 independent samples.
The researchers found that intergroup contact generally reduced prejudice, with stronger results under conditions that supported meaningful and constructive interaction.
A 2024 meta-analysis extended this question to digital environments.
Drawing upon 88 independent samples involving 9,385 participants, the researchers found a small but statistically significant relationship between digital intergroup contact and reduced prejudice.
The findings are encouraging because they suggest that technology can support the development of social understanding.
Digital communication is not inherently hostile.
Its effects depend partly upon the kinds of experiences, encounters and relationships it facilitates.
The internet can expose people to unfamiliar cultures through arguments and caricatures.
It can also connect them through friendship, collaboration and shared interests.
The same infrastructure that distributes ridicule can distribute encouragement.
The same technology that amplifies political hostility can help people understand the ordinary lives of those they have been taught to distrust.
The challenge is to create environments in which constructive interaction becomes easier and more rewarding.
There is also evidence that people benefit from greater authenticity in their public expression.
The previously discussed research on authentic posting suggests that the pressure to maintain idealised identities is not an unavoidable requirement of digital communication.
People can use technology in ways that strengthen their sense of connection with themselves.
These findings point towards a different conception of online culture.
Instead of demanding constant performance, platforms could encourage forms of participation that preserve context, support meaningful relationships and reduce unnecessary social comparison.
Instead of rewarding the fastest dismissal, communities could value explanations.
Instead of presenting outrage as the principal demonstration of moral seriousness, people could recognise that patience, accuracy and cooperation also require ethical commitment.
None of these changes is guaranteed. But they are possible.
That possibility matters because pessimism can become self-fulfilling.
If people assume that society is irredeemably cynical, they may become less willing to express generosity.
If they assume that everyone is hostile towards difference, they may become reluctant to build relationships across social boundaries.
If they assume that enthusiasm is universally embarrassing, they may hide the very interests through which meaningful communities could form.
Optimism, properly understood, involves resisting these assumptions when the evidence does not justify them.
It is the willingness to believe that a better outcome remains possible and to behave accordingly.
XVII. A Culture of Permission
What would it mean to challenge the cultural authority of cringe and woke?
The answer begins with refusing to let dismissive labels perform the work of argument.
When someone calls an artistic expression cringe, we can ask what specifically makes it objectionable.
Is it harmful? Dishonest? Manipulative? Poorly executed? Or does it simply display a degree of sincerity that makes the observer uncomfortable?
These distinctions matter.
A person does not have to admire every piece of amateur art or enjoy every enthusiastic performance. They can still respect the act of trying.
Similarly, when someone dismisses an initiative as woke, we can ask what precisely they disagree with.
Is the policy ineffective? Is the representation inaccurate? Is the institution behaving hypocritically? Is there a genuine conflict of rights or responsibilities?
Or is the objection simply that an unfamiliar group has become visible?
Once the specific issue is identified, meaningful conversation becomes possible.
The label loses some of its power.
The same principle can be applied to our own behaviour.
We can become more conscious of how quickly we resort to ridicule when someone displays enthusiasm.
We can learn to recognise the difference between being genuinely amused by something and using humour to establish superiority.
We can resist the expectation that emotional seriousness must always be surrounded by irony.
There is nothing inherently embarrassing about caring.
A person who loves a particular musical artist, collects unusual objects, researches obscure historical events or writes imaginative stories is expressing an aspect of their individuality.
Their interest does not need to generate income. It does not need to attract a following. It does not need to be defended as a respectable investment of time.
It may simply make their life more interesting.
This possibility deserves protection.
A great deal of contemporary self-help culture encourages people to optimise their lives.
Hobbies become opportunities for productivity. Exercise becomes a public demonstration of discipline. Reading becomes a performance of intellectual seriousness. Creativity becomes a strategy for developing a personal brand.
Even leisure can become another form of labour.
The alternative is to recognise that people are permitted to enjoy activities without demonstrating their usefulness to anyone else.
This permission also applies to emotional life.
Adults are allowed to be moved by films. They are allowed to celebrate the achievements of artists they admire. They are allowed to experience wonder, nostalgia and affection without constructing elaborate explanations for why those feelings are intellectually defensible.
It is possible to retain critical intelligence while remaining emotionally available.
Indeed, the combination may produce richer experiences.
A person who understands the technical limitations of a film can still be moved by its story.
Someone who recognises the commercial motivations behind an entertainment franchise can still appreciate the work of the artists involved.
A person can acknowledge the imperfections of a historical period while preserving affection for the possibilities it represented.
Maturity should make this complexity easier to understand. It should not require the elimination of joy.
The same culture of permission can extend towards other people.
We can allow individuals to describe their experiences without immediately transforming those experiences into political categories.
We can acknowledge the dignity of people whose backgrounds differ from our own.
We can recognise that inclusion, when practised thoughtfully, contributes to the everyday conditions under which people can participate in society.
These behaviours do not demand unanimous agreement about every political question.
They require an underlying willingness to regard other people as human beings rather than symbols of competing ideologies.
That willingness is one of the foundations of civil society. It deserves to be treated as ordinary.
XVIII. What Comes After Cynicism?
There is a temptation to imagine that the solution to contemporary cynicism requires some enormous cultural revolution.
Perhaps a new political movement will restore optimism. Perhaps a major technological change will alter the structure of social media. Perhaps younger generations will simply reject the conventions that have dominated online life.
Such developments are possible.
But cultural change also occurs through much smaller decisions.
A person publishes a piece of art without apologising for its imperfections.
Someone admits that they genuinely love a film others have dismissed.
A parent encourages a child's unusual interest rather than worrying about whether it will appear socially impressive.
A friendship develops between people who were initially unfamiliar with one another's cultural backgrounds.
A teacher creates an environment in which curiosity is rewarded.
An online community establishes norms that make cruelty less attractive and constructive disagreement more rewarding.
None of these actions solves the structural problems of digital capitalism or political polarisation.
Together, however, they demonstrate how culture can be changed through ordinary participation.
Social expectations are sustained by repeated behaviour. They can also be weakened by repeated refusal.
The widespread rejection of certain prejudices did not happen because everyone changed their mind simultaneously.
People challenged assumptions, created alternatives and gradually established different expectations.
The same process can occur around the social treatment of enthusiasm.
If enough people stop rewarding the reflexive humiliation of sincerity, expressing enjoyment may become less socially risky.
If enough people insist upon specific arguments instead of vague accusations of wokeness, the quality of public debate may improve.
The goal is not to eliminate criticism, disagreement, sarcasm or political conflict.
These are enduring aspects of human society.
A healthy culture requires the freedom to challenge ideas, reject artistic choices and question institutional authority.
The goal is to prevent contempt from becoming the default language through which people relate to everything unfamiliar or emotionally exposed.
We should be capable of more.
The extraordinary technological achievements of the past several decades make our present limitations especially frustrating.
Humanity possesses unprecedented tools for translation, communication, artistic production and access to knowledge.
People separated by oceans can collaborate almost instantaneously.
Individuals can discover communities that previous generations would never have been able to find.
Creative techniques once confined to professional institutions are increasingly accessible to ordinary people.
These developments should enlarge the range of experiences available to us.
They should allow people to become more curious, more expressive and more understanding.
There is no technological reason why greater connectivity must result in greater cynicism.
The obstacles are social, economic and political. They can therefore be examined and challenged.
The remarkable thing about joy is that it does not need to be manufactured by institutions.
Human beings discover enjoyment through relationships, imagination, learning, play, art and countless forms of everyday experience.
These capacities may be diminished by hardship, anxiety or hostile social environments, but they do not disappear simply because fashionable language declares them embarrassing.
Likewise, the capacity for empathy does not belong exclusively to any political movement.
People can develop understanding through friendship, proximity, experience and reflection.
They do not need permission from a cultural commentator to recognise another person's humanity.
The task is to make these qualities easier to express.
XIX. Recovering the Future
When I think about what has been lost between the optimism many of us associated with the 1990s and the increasingly antagonistic language of contemporary culture, I keep returning to the same question.
When did we begin treating some of our better instincts as liabilities?
When did visible enjoyment become something that needed to be justified?
When did openness towards other people become an accusation?
The historical answer is complicated. Neither development began with the internet, and neither is universal.
But the contemporary vocabulary has made both tendencies unusually easy to reproduce.
The word cringe can discourage people from exposing their happiness.
The word woke can discourage people from expressing their acceptance of others.
Used carelessly, both invite us to become smaller.
One suggests that we should feel embarrassed about ourselves. The other suggests that we should feel suspicious about one another.
The result can be a society in which people are increasingly attentive to appearances and increasingly uncertain about their relationships with those around them.
There are commercial interests that benefit from insecurity, political interests that benefit from division and technological systems that benefit from emotional engagement.
These incentives are powerful. They are not absolute.
We have substantial evidence that attitudes can improve, that meaningful social contact can reduce prejudice and that authentic expression can contribute to wellbeing.
We also have reason to believe that people are becoming more sceptical of manufactured online identities and the commercial pressures surrounding them.
None of this guarantees a return to an imagined simpler age. Nor should it.
The future worth pursuing is one that learns from the inequalities and exclusions of the past while preserving the imaginative optimism that made progress possible.
It is a future in which adults can love things openly.
A future in which children can encounter different cultures without being taught that curiosity is a political threat.
A future in which people are encouraged to judge artistic works according to their qualities, and other human beings according to their conduct.
A future in which criticism remains intelligent without becoming habitually contemptuous.
And a future in which sincerity is recognised as a form of courage.
We do not need to revive every cultural convention of the 1990s.
We need to recover the confidence that tomorrow can be more generous than yesterday.
That confidence was never the exclusive property of any decade. It remains available to us.
Perhaps the first step is surprisingly simple.
The next time someone expresses uncomplicated happiness about something harmless, we can allow them to enjoy it.
The next time someone makes a sincere attempt to understand another person, we can recognise the value of that effort.
We can stop treating ordinary expressions of humanity as embarrassing or ideologically suspect.
We can resist the reflex to ridicule.
We can refuse to let two dismissive words determine the boundaries of acceptable emotion and social imagination.
We can remember that enthusiasm is a source of creativity, that empathy is a foundation of cooperation, and that neither quality requires an apology.
There will always be reasons for concern about the future. There will also always be reasons to care about it.
Joy is not cringe. Kindness is not something to be ashamed of. Open-mindedness is not a defect.
A civilisation capable of imagining extraordinary futures should also be capable of allowing its people to enjoy the present and care about one another.
That is a future worth working towards.
And it is still within reach.
Research and Further Reading
The argument developed in this essay draws upon research across social psychology, political communication, digital media, consumer behaviour and historical public opinion. Particularly relevant publications include:
Robertson et al. (2023), Negativity drives online news consumption, Nature Human Behaviour.
Pew Research Center (2014), Social Media and the Spiral of Silence.
de Valle et al. (2021), Social media, body image, and the question of causation, Body Image.
Gallup (2026), U.S. Support for LGBTQ+ Issues Remains Down From Peak.
Gartner (2026), 35% of Consumers Rely on Influencers Less Due to AI.
Broadcast reference: Adam Sessler, The Joy of Sess, “Heroes: Do We Have Them?” Twitch channel and recording archive. The individual episode recording has not been independently verified as a stable link.
Written October 2026.
