Cringe and the Fertility Crisis

What Happens When the Anxieties of Attraction Become Intolerable

The industrialized world’s fertility rate continues its steady plummet. In 2023, the United States recorded its lowest rate ever of 1.62 births per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1 births. Likewise for the majority of countries: A Lancet study predicts that by 2050, three-quarters of nations won’t meet replacement fertility rates, and that by 2100, only six (6!) will. All the foregoing is in keeping with previous decades of trends. But with Boomers worldwide poised to overwhelm pension/retirement and healthcare systems, the powers that be are starting to get a little antsy over our failure to produce new workers.

Explanations for the drop in fertility abound. Wage stagflation, obscene housing prices, and student debt load conspire to discourage younger couples from starting families. Many choose not to have children, citing everything from fear of climate change to a flat-out lack of interest. And those that do often stop at one child due to the prohibitive cost of childcare.

But it’s not just that young couples aren’t having children. It’s that the young aren’t coupling, period. Recent surveys indicate that Gen Z not only eschews romantic relationships but sex itself — well, at least sex with a real, live person. Again, explanations for the phenomenon abound. The new generation is slower to reach the age milestones we all once took for granted, such as that first driver’s license or first job . . . or first time in the sack. Online porn and Only Fans have become substitute outlets for the young adult sex drive. And dating apps have made finding a romantic partner a dystopian bloodsport, driven by algorithms and performative “profiles.”

But there’s an additional reason I believe our young and fertile are not finding each other, falling in love, marrying and reproducing: cringe. Or in this instance, the exquisite awkwardness and discomfort humans often must endure in the quest for a mate. This next generation fears cringe because they find its experience intolerable. And technology is reinforcing this fear by offering the palliatives of avoidance and disembodiment.

Above All, Be Chill

According to my exhaustive, 5-second Google search, cringe is broadly defined as “content or behavior that is perceived as embarrassing, awkward, or uncomfortable to watch.” Or as a Gen Z Brown undergrad puts it, cringe is “gut-wrenching, toe-curling, and almost nausea-inducing embarrassment, whether experienced first or secondhand. At its core, cringe means something that must be avoided at all costs.”

Cringe has been with us forever. There’s not a soul amongst us who hasn’t publicly done or said something dumb and wanted to die as a consequence. But the collective preoccupation with cringe really took off with the advent of social media. Millions of anons were now empowered to observe photos, videos, and online comments of other anons and pass judgment on just how stupid and pathetic they were.

I suppose you’d need a Media Studies PhD to parse all the niche categories of cringe content, but from what I’ve observed, it tends to fall into three big groups. These are (1) physical klutziness and mishaps (say, accidentally walking into a glass door); (2) displays of shocking stupidity or ineptitude (thinking Asia is a country in Europe); and (3) over-earnest expressions of emotion. Of these, the third is regarded as the most toxic form of cringe by Millennials and Zoomers.

It’s not that the younger generations don’t feel. And it’s not that they’re against communicating feeling. But from what I glean, there seems to be a subtle-but-enforced dividing line between acceptable sincerity and cringe sincerity. Acceptable sincerity asserts itself casually without getting too worked up over it. Cringe sincerity, in contrast, is intense. It lets whomever is on the receiving end know the speaker not only believes his words but cares about them, deeply. Cringe sincerity may involve more dramatic or artistic expression — the recitation of a poem, say, or the performance of an original song. Thus cringe sincerity is derided as the hallmark of that most loathsome of online personas, the Theater Kid.

How did I come to these conclusions? you might ask. It’s a fair question. I’m entering my crone years, after all, desiccating even as I write. The truth is I’m an older Gen Xer who is not particularly immersed in social media. So how can I make claims about what kids twenty to thirty years my junior find cringe?

All I can say is that, despite my age and general obliviousness, I catch hints here and there. Firstly, it has not escaped my notice that Zoomers and younger Millennials love to EVISCERATE any of their peers who publicly express earnestness. For instance, the communal pile-on this guy received for his original rap about gun violence was brutal.

Okay. So maybe it wasn’t a smart idea to use a recent school shooting as a vehicle to promote oneself on YouTube. Maybe the performer seems to be straining way too hard to be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda. Maybe ending with a falsetto about “children dying” was practically begging to be mocked. Still, the extent and degree of the sarcastic vitriol directed at him was staggering. He obviously has a talent for musical theater, my Gen X mind reasons. So he performed a cheesy number that didn’t land. So what? But for the Zoomer/Millennial, his sin was not simply “missing the mark” entertainment-wise. His sin was being gratuitously, nakedly, and theatrically earnest — an unpardonable offense.

Secondly, the commercials I see targeted towards the younger generations are so ironic and absurd, they have no obvious connection to the products they’re hawking. Take this latest 2024 ad for Snickers candy bar:

I guess the message is that only a Snickers can sedate crazy airline passengers. But if an alien civilization somehow intercepted this commercial and tried to interpret it, they’d be left wondering: What the hell IS a Snickers? A foodstuff, ostensibly, but of what type and taste? The frenetic editing, the exaggerated antics of the passengers — it all reads as a surreal spoof of air travel, not an ad. Sure, we’re marketing a candy bar, the commercial winks, but don’t take it seriously. That would be cringe. Not even a sales pitch to Zoomers can be sincere.

Contrast the foregoing with the now-comical earnest testimonials in a Gen X-era Snickers ad. You not only learn the ingredients in a Snickers. You learn that people really, really, REALLY love that damn candy bar . . . because it’s delicious!

Third and finally, in my shallow forays into social media, occasionally posts such as this will crop up on my feed and give me pause:

I don’t post “Forrest’s” thread as an endorsement of any brand of politics. I post it solely as an interesting window into the Zoomer/young Millennial outlook on romantic and sexual relationships. The author quotes Lisa Wade’s American Hookup, in which Wade interviewed college-age students on navigating the campus hookup scene. The grim conclusion is that success and survival are wholly dependent upon Being Chill. As Wade reports:

Students aim, then, for aloofness. “Hookup buddies never should talk about emotions or anything too personal,” one student insisted. “You can never show your true feelings and insecurities to the partner,” explained another . . . Being unchill is way uncool.

But being uninterested is also a relative state. The idea is not just to not care, it’s to care less . . . So, after a hookup, students monitor each other’s level of friendliness and try to come in below the other person. Each time one person takes a step back emotionally, the other takes two. They can end up backed into their respective corners, avoiding eye contact, and pretending the other doesn’t exist.

Plenty of people weighed in on Forrest’s thread, arguing that the urge to appear cool, ironic, and above-it-all is hardly unique to the latest generation. Two of the touchstone films of Gen X, after all, were Slackers (1991) and Clerks (1994), both of which portrayed youth as underwhelmed, under-employed, and —above all — sardonic. And even the adults of the era embraced the hyper-irony of Seinfeld and its cultural progeny.

This is very true. But it’s equally true, and of utmost importance, that Gen X came of age with Lloyd Dobler.

That’s right: My generation cheered on John Cusack wooing Ione Skye by standing outside her window whilst hoisting a boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes. To Zoomers/Millennials, Dobler is hopelessly cringe. To Gen X, he’s hopelessly romantic. Sure, his stunt is a little goofy, but the stakes — love itself! — are worth it.

Even as the ironically detached vibe of the 90’s took root and spread, the defining movie genre of the era, the Rom Com, valorized the insanely earnest pursuit of love — a pursuit that often entailed torturous discomfort and self-consciousness. Hell, in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Hugh Grant launched his entire career on the manic blinking, stammering, and floppy-hair-tugging that accompanied his profession of love to Andie MacDowell. And into the early aughts, when the Rom Com experienced its first death throes, it was convention to see a protagonist running: to stop his love being wed to That Jerk, to confess her feelings to her love before he departed forever on That Plane. Overdone cliche? God, yes. But it drove home that the pursuit of love is embodied, that it’s experienced physically, that it demands heart-pounding, stomach-churning daring and effort.

So what are the great Zoomer Rom Coms? There aren’t any, because the exquisite emotional discomfort and self-consciousness which Gen X found so charming in Hugh Grant is something Gen Z desperately wants to avoid . . . and the tech lets them.

And the running? Well, Zoomers aren’t about to run after love. That would be stalk-y and needy and weird — definitely not Chill. Besides, there’s no guarantee that all that huffing and sweating won’t still result in rejection. Better for Gen Z to proactively minimize their risk . . . and the tech lets them.

Profiles, Ghosts and Disembodiment

It’s easy for older generations to mock Zoomers for their oversized dread of cringe. But older generations came of age when you could be an untrammelled idiot without cell phones documenting and sharing your behavior almost instantaneously. Or, as the writer Freya India puts it, we enjoyed “the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online.”

It’s an interesting phenomenon she’s pin-pointing. Surely every time a Zoomer does or says something cringeworthy, it’s not as if an army of that Zoomer’s peers is standing ready with cell phone cameras in hand to record the whole bloody ordeal. Surely countless cringeworthy interactions occur every day unnoticed and without being circulated over tech.

But the very ubiquitous of the tech — everybody has a cell! — creates a pervasive sense of surveillance. And if you sense you’re being surveilled, even if it’s not a certainty, you become self-conscious. A fissure occurs between the real, embodied, Internal You and the Performative You, who is subject to an audience — even if only a potential one. You become hyper-aware of how you might be perceived, which is a helluva way to subvert any risks you might take to find a boyfriend or girlfriend. In fact, it’s a helluva way to subvert any risks, period. It sounds pretty much like living under a Soviet totalitarian state where you make one misstep and your nasty, embittered neighbor might report you to the regime.

Many medically prescribed pharmaceuticals cause side effects which are treated with more medically prescribed pharmaceuticals. Botox injections cause non-paralyzed facial muscles to wrinkle, and these wrinkles are treated with more Botox. Likewise, the anxiety of self-consciousness that Tech creates by splitting the Internal and Performative Self is treated . . . with more Tech. Specifically:

• Avatars and Profiles, particularly when used in dating apps, allow users to carefully curate a digital image of themselves so as to avoid the appearance of cringe. The problem is that when everyone’s carefully curating an image of themselves, everyone’s in on the scam. And so users — mostly females, who know a thing or two about deceptive appearances — gravitate towards profiles that display the most verifiable traits. These traits are cravenly shallow and reductive, providing good ammo for any misogynist. But they are also cringe-less and easily cross-checked in reality: namely, good looks and good income. As a result, women largely pass over most male dating app “matches” in favor of a narrow echelon of men who can pick and choose one-night-stands as they please. As Professor Jonathan Haidt describes, the process creates a chasm of mistrust between the sexes that negatively interferes with their future prospects for love, marriage, and children.

@wallstreetjournalJonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells @Julia Munslow that dating apps are having unintended consequences on the romantic lives of Gen Z. #WSJFuture #dating #datingapps #genz #psychology #wsj #wallstreetjournal #thewallstreetjournal

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• Ghosting, moreover, allows users to skirt the cringe-y pain of rejection by participating in a digital ruse of non-existence. Even if two Zoomers throw their fear of cringe to the wind and meet up for a date, if it doesn’t go well, Tech provides a way to nip things in the bud without the awkwardness of a face-to-face (or even phone) conversation. Since Zoomers communicate almost always by text, the non-interested party simply ignores the offending party’s texts. The sudden and unexplained radio silence sends an unmistakable message: Our interactions, for all intents and purposes, never happened, and you are dead to me. How is the denial of your existence less painful and more preferable than an in-person rejection? I have no idea, I’m Gen Z. For all her bunny-boiling faults, one of my generation’s icons, Alex Forrest, had the right idea:

. . . and of course, all the foregoing tech-driven disembodiment in the name of cringe-avoidance has only doubled back on itself to promote even more disembodiment in the pursuit of sexual relationships and love. This is readily seen in:

• Affinity-Based Sexual Orientations. In her essay It’s a Vibe: How Sexual Orientation Lost the “Sex”, writer and online sub-culture expert Katherine Dee describes how a growing number of Zoomers treat sexual orientation as a matter of having affection, admiration, or good “feelings” towards that orientation. For example, a not-negligible number of Zoomers believe that they are lesbian, despite never having had sexual relations with a woman and exclusively having sexual relationships with males:

This is sexual orientation as fandom, rather than sexual orientation as the physical, embodied, and yes, enacted attraction to men or women.

And then the pundits scratch their heads and wonder why the upcoming generations aren’t having kids.

Step Into the Cringe Arena

There are plenty of common-sense suggestions as to how to reduce Cringe Fear and encourage successful dating, coupling and family formation.

Maybe Gen Z and young Millennials need to get off their phones, limit their time online, and start interacting with and meeting potential romantic partners In Real Life, without the deceptive filter of apps. Maybe parents need to step in to delay giving their children cell phones. Maybe tech companies need to step in to raise the age at which minors are eligible to use their apps.

All good fodder for debate. But to my mind, the solution, at bottom, is this: Zoomers and Millennials must simply learn, as did prior generations, to accept cringe as a fact of life. They must realize that physical and emotional discomfort are baked into the pursuit of love. This is something we all used to know. The truth of it was embedded in our pop songs.

You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain.

I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky tumbling down/I feel my heart start to trembling/Whenever you’re around.

If you only knew what you’re putting me through/It feels like a heart attack.

If the earnest expression of emotion is cringe, then the young must learn to commit cringe. They must dare to confess attraction, to pursue those they desire, even if it means looking and feeling like idiots. Whether their efforts are reciprocated or rejected, they will earn the priceless knowledge that cringe is survivable. (Isn’t that the essence of the most successful form of psychological treatment, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Debunking the idea that your fears will destroy you?).

In short, they must become Jon Favreau in Swingers, willing to seek out romance in the real world and fail bigly at it.

A commenter to this video describes Favreau as “falling into an abyss of cringe.” Well sure, there’s that. He’s definitely not Chill. But if you watch the movie you know he gets back on the horse and, by the end, finds himself a love interest.

Besides, what’s the alternative? A total retreat into tech? Empowering our dating profiles, which are fake, with AI, such that our profiles can algorithmically screen for other fake profiles? And then the fake AI profiles can go on fake “dates” and see how it goes? All so we can avoid the inevitable but temporary embarrassments and disappointments of human romantic interaction?

Apparently that is the alternative.

I’ll take the Cringe Abyss, thanks.