At some point the internet made everyone deeply afraid of caring about things, which is a weird thing to let happen but here we are. Social media gave everyone an audience and the audience turned out to be mean, so the logical response was to stop visibly trying, and it didn’t take long for irony to become the default and apathy to become the vibe. Sincerity became something you couldn’t afford which is interesting because sincerity is also the only thing that works.

Lady Gaga is basically the Cinderella of i-don’t-care-ism, except instead of a glass slipper the origin story involves bleached eyebrows and a Facebook group her NYU classmates made called “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous,” while she was performing theatrical little sets at Lower East Side dive bars and taking herself completely seriously before anyone else was. It wasn’t really about her. It never is. For most, “cringe” is the discomfort of watching someone be fully, embarrassingly committed to a version of themselves the world hasn’t signed off on yet, and realizing somewhere in the back of their mind that they haven’t been committed to anything at all. Calling it cringe is just the easiest way to make that feeling someone else’s problem.

One former SHS student BLACKSTAR Haus spoke to recalls she spent most of secondary school watching anime, teaching herself to draw, and at some point made the critical error of telling a classmate she listened to JPop. “She looked at me like, what? You listen to Japanese music?”

This was right in the middle of KPop’s global takeover, when Ghanaian secondary school students decided that Korean pop music was a reasonable thing to be into, which meant JPop, its older and arguably more eccentric cousin, wasn’t quite trendy yet. “Most of the other girls in my year really liked talking about boys,” she says, and those same girls spent a considerable portion of secondary school asking whether she had a crush on anyone before eventually escalating to whether she ever planned to get married, which is a significant amount of existential pressure to put on someone who was just trying to pass their WASSCE. Her family at home had similar concerns, so she learned to make sure the hallway was always empty before she sat down to draw. Eventually, she stopped drawing altogether.

“I always wonder where I would be right now if I hadn’t let it get to me,” she says. When we asked why she wanted to stay anonymous she paused. “I still feel a bit embarrassed,” she said.

The embarrassing phase is not skippable, by the way. Every success story has a version where the person was posting into the void, making things that weren’t quite there yet, and doing it publicly while people who know them watched and winced and sent it to the group chat. That’s fine. Their secondhand embarrassment is theirs, it just means they couldn’t stomach doing it themselves. And once there’s enough proof of concept that the early stuff looks like a rough draft, nobody’s going back to clown on it. It just becomes lore.

And most of us won’t try something until someone else has already survived trying it first. Then suddenly everyone is doing it, everyone has always liked it, and everyone was going to do it anyway. But waiting for validation is—ironically—the “cringiest” thing you can do.

Once you stop caring about the cringe allegations you get your life back, and honestly it looks really fun from the outside. Everyone else is running on fumes, performing unbothered, policing what’s too earnest, and maintaining this exhausting front where nothing is allowed to mean too much. The people who are most annoyed by someone being openly, happily embarrassing are always the ones who wish they could do it too. They’re not mad at you, they’re really mad at themselves for caring so much.

Embarrassing yourself is a radical act. It means deciding what you care about is actually worth looking a little silly for. And that’s not cringe. That’s actually very brave of you.

Written By: HQ