Kendall Roy stands on a stage in Dundee, Scotland, ready to honor his father’s 50 years at the top of Waystar RoyCo with an original rap. “L to the OG, Dude be the OG” booms through the speakers, and he commits like he’s headlining Madison Square Garden, delivering every word with the conviction of a man who truly believes this is going well. Executives and shareholders shift in their seats. Logan stares back, completely unmoved. It’s one of the funniest scenes in Succession, a show with a shelf full of Emmys, and easily among the most excruciating. Seeing it play out, you want to pull your shirt over your head, or rush up there and wrestle the mic away before Kendall drops another bar. The secondhand embarrassment borders on physical pain, as if you were the one performing. For a lot of young people today, there’s nothing worse than being the Kendall in the room. According to a Yahoo/YouGov poll this year, the fear of coming across as cringe has stopped Gen Z from opening up about how they feel, voicing their opinions, sharing personal achievements, and even asking someone on a date. Not one of those things comes close to rapping under a blinding spotlight while an entire crowd prays for it to be over. So how did cringe get such a tight grip on a whole generation? The answer has a lot to do with growing up in a world that’s always watching. Beatriz Camaleão (not the actual photo) Maria Baranova (not the actual photo) Cringe originally comes from the Old English cringan, which meant to yield or fall in battle and to become bent, and it grew out of a Proto-Germanic root meaning to curl up. The same ancient family later gave English the word crinkle. In its earliest sense, cringing described a body collapsing in defeat, though the word only appears in writing from Middle English onward, with the first known examples dating to the 13th century. Over the following centuries, the battlefield faded from the definition while the bending stayed. To cringe came to mean drawing back in fear or pain, and it also picked up a servile streak, describing people who cowered in front of someone more powerful. By 1990, English speakers were using “cringe-worthy” for anything awkward enough to make you physically recoil. Then came the internet. In the early 2000s, cringe began shifting from a verb into a noun and adjective, and YouTube eventually filled up with “cringe compilations” stitching together strangers’ most awkward moments. Reddit gave the trend a permanent home with r/cringe. As feelings go, cringe rarely lasts more than a few seconds before it’s over, and the stakes are a far cry from falling on a battlefield. It might seem silly, then, that something so fleeting has such a hold on Gen Z. There’s a lot more to it, though. Olha Ruskykh (not the actual photo) When Yahoo and YouGov polled young adults earlier this year, the results revealed a generation constantly policing its own behavior. More than half of adult Gen Z respondents said they had avoided expressing themselves freely online for fear of being seen as cringe, and 55% said it had kept them from opening up to someone emotionally. Some 38% said it had stopped them from asking someone on a date, 35% said it had kept them from pursuing hobbies, and 19% said it had made them pass on a professional opportunity. Millennials, now between 30 and 44, were less afraid of cringe on every single measure. The fear even reaches the drafts folder. According to the same poll, 55% of 18-to-29-year-olds have typed out a post only to delete it. Charlie, a 19-year-old from Connecticut, told Yahoo that holding back from sharing interests with friends and family eventually killed the passion altogether, leaving behind a feeling of being weird for ever liking the thing in the first place. UCLA psychologist Erica Rozmid says many of her young clients are so consumed by the fear of cringe that they need professional help to work through it. In her view, a quick flash of shame after feeling rejected is perfectly normal, while the constant misery of trying to dodge embarrassment altogether is something else entirely. Gen Z was once praised for craving authenticity. Tired of influencers and picture-perfect content, they wanted unfiltered bodies and messy, everyday lives on their Instagram feeds. But being truly authentic inevitably opens you up to more rejection, Rozmid notes. “I don’t know if they are prioritizing authenticity as much as they are prioritizing acceptance,” she told Yahoo. Zachary Nelson (not the actual photo) Part of the reason Gen Z is so afraid of being cringe comes down to what they watched happen to the generation before them. Writing for The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany pointed out that much of the internet’s earliest cringe could be traced back to ordinary people posting homemade videos, seemingly unaware that anyone in the world could watch them. The embarrassment, in other words, was accidental. Millennials were the first to experiment with social media as tweens and teens, and they used it to love things loudly, from sorting themselves into Harry Potter houses to posting staged shots of avocado toast. Over time, that enthusiasm came to look hopelessly naive. Ana, a 25-year-old from Arizona, told Yahoo that trailblazers always get mocked, especially when the internet had no established social rules yet. Gen Z grew up watching the fallout. Wes, a 25-year-old from Massachusetts, remembers that some of the first things he watched as a teenager were cringe compilations made from clips of largely marginalized people, many of them neurodivergent or LGBTQ, spliced together for viewers to gawk at. The message, as he put it, was “How dare they exist wrongly?” In his view, cringe turned into a weapon at the most dangerous possible moment, just as his generation was starting to find its way online. Alexander Mass (not the actual photo) Today’s young adults have no illusions about who’s on the other side of the screen. Mark Beal, a Rutgers communications professor who has written four books about Gen Z, told Yahoo that this generation are both consumers and creators, with one poll finding that about two-thirds consider themselves content creators. What happens to them online carries as much weight as real life, and every post invites thousands of strangers to pick apart everything from an outfit to a face. Graduating doesn’t wipe the slate clean anymore either, since Gen Z carries its social media footprint into every new chapter. The algorithms make it worse. Anger is the most viral emotion online, so platforms built to chase clicks keep serving up someone new to argue about every day, and anyone can be next. Tyler, a 27-year-old from Georgia, told Yahoo that a private moment can now rack up 12 million views on TikTok within three hours. At the same time, going completely unnoticed can sting just as much. Wes compared a post that flops to telling a joke at a party and getting nothing back but blank stares. The pressure follows them into the classroom. Writer and NYU professor Ocean Vuong has said his students increasingly worry that chasing a dream like becoming a poet looks a bit cringe, and he points to a culture of surveillance around social media as the reason. SHVETS production (not the actual photo) All of this means that wherever Gen Z goes, someone is always recording, and anyone can accidentally end up in the background of a stranger’s TikTok or Instagram story. The cameras are getting harder to spot, too. EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta smart glasses in 2025, over three times as many as in the two previous years combined, so the person casually glancing your way might be filming as well. As a result, even a carefree night out with friends, one of life’s simplest joys, has become something to think twice about. Natalie Soibatian, a 24-year-old visitor experience coordinator at a museum in the US, remembers going to a club in Los Angeles a few years ago where nobody was dancing. She told The Guardian that people check whether their friends are joining in before they move a muscle, terrified of being recorded looking goofy. Everyone ends up waiting for someone else to go first, and “nobody’s willing to start any more.” Amar Preciado (not the actual photo) Some young people are pushing back. Katie Whitney, 25, has built a TikTok following of 2.5 million with deliberately toe-curling skits, part of a corner of the internet known as CringeTok. She told The Guardian that the first time she posted one, it felt like a weight had been lifted. Shaking off the shame doesn’t require a public spectacle, though. Giner-Sorolla suggests narrowing your focus to a small group of friends you can be completely authentic with. That way, even if strangers online find you cringe, you still have a circle that accepts you as you are. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett makes a similar point. Close relationships and a sense of belonging are good for the brain, he told The Guardian, and while everyone needs a community, an audience isn’t necessary. As Soibatian sees it, the person judging someone else for being cringe is the one who’s actually cringy. Kendall Roy may never live down his tribute to Logan. Still, he got up there and gave it everything he had, which is more than a lot of people on that Los Angeles dance floor can say.
