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The Cringe Shall Inherit the Earth · Cobra Lily

• Ella Simone: Being cringe has just become the ultimate social failure for Gen Z. Where I feel like for millennials, it was probably being inauthentic. For Gen X, it was probably being a sellout. And that's really a problem because the fear of being cringe. generally discourages sincerity, it discourages risk taking and self-expression. while reflecting this like timeless sphere of rejection that's been around forever, I think it's launched us into this new era of like self-censorship and self-surveillance that is making everyone scared and kind of boring. Hi guys, welcome back to Cobra Lily. This is Ella coming at you on camera for the first time ever. And when I say first time ever, I really mean first time ever because I just recorded this episode and it was in the audio-only setting. Womp womp womp. So I went downstairs, got a little snack, fixed my lip gloss, and sat my ass back down in this chair to re-record because the show must go on. Today I'm gonna be talking about. Cringe, the fear of being cringe, the concept of to be cringe is to be free. This concept that's been circulating the discourse for the past two years, I would say. And I'm really excited to get into this. It's gonna be a lighter episode, it's gonna be a more pop culture heavy episode, and it's gonna be an easy breezy time. So thank you for tuning in. I wanted to announced that the podcast going forward will be a solo podcast with frequent guests on. And one of those frequent guests is going to be our dear friend Maria, who is still my home girl and I did not have any beef with whatsoever. There was no argument. There was no big creative disagreement. I just wanted to take this podcast in a video direction and she understandably felt unc uncomfortable with that. I wanted episodes to come out a little more frequently and it was getting really difficult to match our schedules together. And this was originally kind of conceived as a solo project and I kind of want to have the full creative brains to realize my vision because I do have such a specific idea of what I want. And I don't want to compromise my vision or our friendship. So Ray's gonna be back in a couple episodes. so you guys are still gonna get to hear from her. And we love Maria. There's no hate for real. And you guys will be able to tell. So today's topic, like I said, is the topic of cringe. I've noticed that the reflexive criticism in my generation is no longer to call something lame or inauthentic, but to call it cringe. And while this can be an accurate critique, I feel like It has expanded into this catch-all dismissal of anyone who tries earnestly at anything. And I think that's really a shame. I read this poll from Yahoo and UGov that demonstrated the really pervasive effects of this fear of cringe on Gen Z, my generation. More than half of the adult Gen Z respondents said that they've avoided expressing themselves online for fear of coming across as cringe. And that's not to say that a little bit of self-censorship online isn't necessary, but I think they've avoided realizing their full vision or really letting their freak flag fly on social media, I guess, for fear of coming across as cringe, even for things that really shouldn't be considered cringe. It has also seeped in people's lives beyond the internet. I think the fear of being cringe has prevented a lot of people from opening up to others authentically, according to this poll. So large shares of the people surveyed said it's held them back from pursuing romantic interests or professional opportunities, which I found kind of crazy. I would never think of accepting a job offer or pursuing some kind of professional path as something that's cringe. it really demonstrates the invasiveness of this fear on my generation. I think it goes beyond social anxiety, which has always existed it has really germinated on the transnational stage of social media. And the fear of cringe has kind of become its own way of thinking about self-presentation and about embarrassment. I think it's scaring a lot of people away from the very necessary work of failing before starting to get something right or starting at all. And I'm here to tell you why you need to, Pursue your interests anyway, even if they do seem cringe or you do fear other people's judgments. But we need to define cringe. What is cringe? Cambridge University Press defined it as a response to embarrassment or social awkwardness by proxy. So it describes this vicarious embarrassment whenever one is in the presence of a social blunder or public failures or threats to social integrity. I think a key aspect of cringe as opposed to regular awkwardness or social anxiety is a lack of self-awareness. The implication of cringe is that if you had any self-awareness, you would realize that whatever you're doing reflects poorly on you. So it's not just the act of trying to do something and failing, but not knowing you're failing at it, not being in on the joke, not being ahead of the critique. I think self-consciousness and unbridled self-awareness is gonna be one of the big challenges of my generation. I think that same self-awareness pushes people to choose an aesthetic to identify with, each associated with its own array of media and products and icons. First thing I think of is like the clean girl aesthetic or the coconut girl aesthetic I think it kind of pushes people to shrink into these pre-selected, almost like algorithmically generated identities and is kind of eroding individuality. Being cringe has just become the ultimate social failure for Gen Z. Where I feel like for millennials, it was probably being inauthentic. For Gen X, it was probably being a sellout. being cringe has just become like worst-case scenario, biggest fear of so many members of my generation. And that's really a problem because the fear of being a cringe. generally discourages sincerity, it discourages risk taking and self-expression. while reflecting this like timeless sphere of rejection that's been around forever, I think it's launched us into this new era of like self-censorship and self-surveillance that is making everyone scared and kind of boring. So what gets called cringe? I would say certain musicians, certain aesthetics are very, very heavily associated with cringe. I'm thinking of Imagine Dragon Stomp Clap radio hits of the 2010s. I'm thinking Taylor Swift. I'm thinking Glee. There's certain things that really are cringe and they kind of deserve the title. But I think it's expanded into Sharing emotional posts, expressing strong enthusiasm for personal interests, experimenting with self-expression in ways that are considered kind of taboo. I read a piece in The Guardian about the fear of being cringe, and one of the girls interviewed is a fashion content creator, and she said that she thinks that Gen Z's cozy up to kind of conservative minimalist aesthetics like the mob wife aesthetic, the Clean girl aesthetic, the preppy, minimal, Brandy Melville aesthetic is a reflection of this fear of really boisterous, loud, like in-your-face self-expression. Gen Z's fear of being cringe is warranted because doing something cringe could easily lead you to getting filmed, to getting screenshotted, posted, and mocked online. You can literally become. a laughing stock overnight. And the way algorithms are set up now, anyone can really go viral. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of rhyme or reason behind it. I went super viral on TikTok when I was 19. I just posted a random video making fun of peanut allergies and it got four and a half million views in two weeks or something. And I was in no way prepared for just the Cabal of faceless critics that shredded my appearance and shredded my speaking voice and took what I was saying way too seriously. I didn't ask for any of that. I wasn't trying to build a following. It just happened. I thought of that Tyler the Creator quote where he says, How is cyberbullying real? Just close your computer. And that's what I did. I deleted the app and I didn't get back on until I made a TikTok to promote my zine. I'm an artist and I used to cringe at myself every time I posted a collage or an essay or a poem, no matter how good I felt like it was, because I knew I didn't have the amount of eyeballs on my page to show people that what I was putting out was worth looking at. it sucks that we've been taught to Filter everything through this lens of metrics and analytics and social media performance, the likes, the comments, the shares, the views. It sucks that we've been programmed that way, but that is the programming. we've never had so much access to data about ourselves and about other people's perceptions. So it makes perfect sense that anyone would feel daunted by the very obvious, numbers when your post flops. It's so embarrassing. I used to experience like full body cringe every time I posted anything on my art account. it's only in like the last three months I've gotten, almost fully comfortable with doing it. I still have my moments, but I've done it so many times. I've just sensitized myself to the concept of scrutiny at the level that I'm at. I'm not on stage at the Grammys or anything. it doesn't really affect me anymore. And I want everyone to get to that point where it doesn't really affect them. But I think often the only way out of the cringe asylum is through. you have to keep posting, you have to desensitize yourself. But more on that later. Poetry in particular is so vulnerable. it takes so little time to read a poem that I think my poems probably get more eyes on them than my essays do. And unlike painting or instrumental music where you can ascertain themes and the artist feelings in the work in a more subtle way, poetry is directly from writer to pen onto page. it's so blunt in a way. And that in particular felt ridiculous of me to put out my very vulnerable innermost thoughts to everyone I know. Because vulnerability is bold and cool when there's an audience, but it feels like you're being so desperate when you don't have one. I felt like I was coming off as so desperate to everybody while bearing my soul on Instagram for six likes. Like It was the trenches, but I would say much of what Gen Z finds cringe online today is a backlash to millennial culture, which I think is defined by earnestness and seeking approval. I feel millennials are more likely to stay late at work and put in all this overtime hours and Gen Z is a lot more aloof And if you think about it, millennials began experimenting with social media in their early teens. They didn't grow up in the content panopticon like we did. Much of their online behavior was so sincere and was just about loving things deeply and sharing it with everybody. it could be really cringe when millennials would, you know, express their passion for musicals or Harry Potter. Or use terms like adulting. but there was something kind of sweet about the naivete. They were so enthusiastic about their interests and passions and there weren't really any social norms yet for social media when they started. They were the trailblazers of Facebook of my space. I feel like we should cut them th some slack for being so earnest and dorky. And I think the kind of recent glorification of millennial optimism that I've been seeing around social media reflects this realization that, wow, what they had was pure and special and hopeful. we as Gen Z don't really have this earnest, like, lack of awareness about our own presentation. And we have a lot more things to worry about and a lot fewer reasons to be so optimistic about the future. And I think there's a big yearning for that. the way that social media and the algorithms have been reconstructed in a much more randomized and less linear way, I think, makes everyone feel a little bit paranoid about the concept of something blowing up or hopeful about the concept of something blowing up. Social media used to be like follower lists and linear timelines, and now it's these kind of sophisticated feeds that are out of order. and random and seemingly without numerical logic basically anyone can become the subject of internet vitriol overnight. So I think that's changed our relationship with social media. and also made more people more conscious of how to go viral and there are probably way more people trying to go viral now. There is this NYU professor interviewed in the New York Times piece I read about being cringe, who said more and more of his students are becoming self-conscious about trying. He said there's a surveillance culture around social media and they'll say, I want to be a poet, I wanna be a good writer, but it's a bit cringe. I don't want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams. And that sucks. So, why do we care about being cringe? We know that social anxiety has existed since the dawn of time. We know that social inclusion is really important for human survival, and that need to chase that is kind of baked into our psyche as human beings. but I think overall Gen Z's crippling self-consciousness is a direct result of our premature exposure to. And exposure on the internet. We've seen too much and we've shown too much. I remember being on OmegaL in private chat rooms with adult men when I was a teenager with my friends. And I remember boys talking about watching videos of ISIS members beheading people before I was even in high school. We've just seen so much stuff, so many of us have years and years of digital footprint and That wasn't the case for any generation ever in human history. So you can imagine that the effects on our psyche are kind of unprecedented. millennials, while they did start to use social media as they developed into adults, they didn't grow up with this total digital saturation. If you've seen the movie The Truman Show, it's a movie with Jim Carrey about this guy who Doesn't realize that he's being filmed for reality TV show and his whole life is a set. And at some point in the movie, he has this realization that he's on camera and that he's being surveilled and everything he's doing is being evaluated by others. millennials had that probably in their teens to maybe early adulthood, depending on when they were born, whereas Gen Z grew up in the Truman Show and is aware that we grew up in the Truman Show. it's a totally different lens of perception that we've had to deal with. our parents have been right alongside us participating in the internet too. It's not like this was a one-off thing. I felt like as a kid there was this pressure to participate in social media to be socially relevant. There's this pressure to show off your accomplishments and the highlight reel of your life that even parents buy into. it's a societal change, that everyone is kind of suffering from. But I think my generation was kind of doomed to heighten self-consciousness because it's been so instrumental in our development as people. And we also grew up alongside the internet as it curdled into something. increasingly absurd and frightening and inescapable. I I hear a lot of people lament the earlier days of social media and when the internet used to be more fun and when it wasn't overrun by bots and weird, subtle advertising and all this crazy, extreme content that we see. So I think to cope, we've learned to create distance from all that through irony. We listen to music knowing it's bad. We convert major political events into memes minutes after they happen. And that's all part of a cope also of growing up on social media exposed to a constant stream of peer success stories that our parents registered right alongside with us. Like we saw when our classmates got into this kind of school, and we saw when our classmates were given this reward for sports or whatever. It just feels like from the time that we learned to dribble a basketball, we became aware of the pressure to keep it bouncing forever. We are not used to seeing people fail. it seems like a lot of my generation really struggles to metabolize public failures and missteps on the part of celebrities. That's not to say that all cancel culture is unwarranted, because it's not, but we really seem to have a difficulty simultaneously like holding many truths about people and allowing them to like flop and sticking with them as fans. I think there's a lot of insane fan loyalty, but there's lot of disloyalty too. And we attack people so much for trying new things. And I think it's really hating from outside the club and it sucks. We have to let people mess up and we have to let them get up again or else like how can they evolve and how can we evolve? I also think that as every generation gets further away from these traditional Judeo Christian norms and values, we are still going to search for different ways to police others back into self-consciousness. if we're not gonna care about being gay as much anymore, we're gonna have to find something else to attack people for. And a note on being gay, I feel like what people mean when they say something is cringe today is what they meant in the 90s when people would call something gay. the description is kind of the same. It's like a tackiness, a corniness an excessive sincerity. And I think that's what people are getting at when they describe something as cringe in 2025, I feel like that was when the whole cringe discourse was at its most prevalent. And that was when we really saw policing take the form of an attack on sincerity rather than anything else. it was really about trying too hard, being a try hard or a farming All this stuff. And millennials got to try hard and fail in relative privacy. we never really had that luxury. Although we did also watch many millennials get clowned on for trying too hard, and I think that kind of scared us a bit. I remember my earliest days on YouTube, my step siblings and I would watch cringe compilations of people like falling off of treadmills and stuff. So I think we internalized that surveillance of social media. but we also were not given as much time to have our really embarrassing skater phases in peace and not online, like the way that millennials did. this might be a little out there, but I think being cringe reminds us of our own mortality and our own inevitable creep toward unk status. For most people, they do lose a bit of aura and swag as they age. They don't have the virility and energy that they did when they were young. And there's like millennial women who were the coolest people in the shit in 2010, and now If they posted an Instagram reel, people would call them a chooky mom, So I think it does kinda remind people of their fleeting status as members of youth culture. And that is also frightening. I do want to reiterate that obviously self-consciousness is nothing new. Most people are propelled by these negative beliefs about themselves that exist in this uneasy contrast with a sense of how obvious those things are. And this is the paradox that creates self-consciousness. Like everyone has certain things about themselves that they think everyone must be quietly judging them for. I think everyone at some point their life overestimates how invested other people are in what they're doing. And I think a lot of people suffer from that mental prison all the time. the thing is on social media, you are being judged, you are being evaluated. Like it's not just in your head. And social media has wormed its way into our brains. So of course we're gonna like internalize some of the ways that we think about self presentation because most of us spend so much time on it. I don't think this logging off movement is gonna happen. I think we're we're firmly on, and I certainly am. Another aspect of cringe is the fact that modern society runs on these values of compulsive doing, in the words of spiritual leader Eckhart Sole. So constant productivity, constant optimization, performance, performance, performance. The inescapable presence of measurement, follower counts, cortisol levels, apps tracking the number of pages you read every day. This is like the reason why I felt embarrassed to post poems that get five likes on Instagram because they didn't have numerical metrics that told me that I'm doing a good job. And it's actually can be really embarrassing to feel like your post flopped on Instagram, and I many times found myself saying to myself, I should just delete this and pretend it never happened, but I told myself I wouldn't do that. So this is different from, you know, telling a bad joke in a group of people and no one laughing. With social media you actually have metrics to prove how hard you flopped and damn, it's fucking tough to look at that. It really is. so like I said earlier, many members of my generation have had some kind of brush with viral fame. And most people don't really look back on it fondly because there's this awareness that nothing ever really goes away these days. And you can go from having a private moment to being the laughing stock of the internet in an hour. So Naturally, Gen Z is gonna be a lot more careful about what we say and what we do digitally because we know it can spiral so quickly. And even if a video gets deleted, there's people who screenshot, there's people who screen record, and there's people who remember you for these very accidental mishaps. So it's a lot of pressure. It's scary. I think also just the culture of kind of discussion and discourse around everything everywhere all the time. adds a lot of pressure to putting artwork out there or even your gym fitness journey videos out there or whatever you're posting. just knowing that a song you put out could get like endlessly dissected and deconstructed by people who generate discourse on the internet, it just again like adds to this feeling of hypervigilance about how we're perceived it feels so high stakes because it's not just the people around you seeing your work or the people who were there for your basement show when you performed, anyone can film it, anyone can see it, and you don't really have control of it. At the psychological level, humans didn't evolve to be the subject of judgment to so many other people. Biologically, we've adapted to live in these pretty small groups. We're not adapted to live where millions of eyes are on us. And when we lived in smaller offline communities, we could basically just adapt to fit the people who lived around us or not adapt to fit in with those people. But now you have the choice of fitting in with a million different subcultures, the public at large, And there's a lot more choices to make, and there's a lot more layers of subtext to everything you do, and there's a million layers of irony, and it's just so much more complicated. And I wanna add that while everyone could benefit from having a community, not everyone is meant to have an audience. Not everyone wants to be perceived in mass, not everyone wants to think about. having a digital self that they have to manage and that's okay. I'm not here to proselytize and try to make everyone turn into a content creator. A lot of people aren't cut out for it and we've seen so many people crack under that pressure. So it's not something that you need to strongly encourage yourself to do if it doesn't really align with your values and how you want to spend your time. So what have been the results of Gen Z's crippling fear of being cringe? I would say that ironic detachment and nonchalance have been the central defense mechanisms against this fear and two qualities that I think might live on to define the personality archetype of my generation. Like I said, there's this premium placed on self-awareness, which I think is so overrated and often just leads to anxiety, but there's this idea that self-awareness will insulate you from being cringe because you're in on the joke and you're ahead of the discourse. Another response I think we've had to this fear, especially in a in the realm of pop music and pop culture, I think is this elevation of camp and absurdity to the point where it becomes a commentary. mainstream music spends so much time referencing other things that we know that work, referencing pin up, referencing nineties vampire, referencing Britney Spears Y2K. because I think there's a safety in repeating what we know works, but there's also this contingent of pop culture that is kind of predicated on maximalism and camp and extremism and there's nothing wrong with that. Even though Camp isn't traditionally my favorite mode of expression, I can see that it's acceptable because it pokes fun at our vapid and materialistic culture rather than simply reflecting it back to us in a way that's kind of disquieting. But like reflexively resorting to irony, I think compulsively intellectualizing andor satirizing art as a commentary on, a commentary on, is just another way of creating distance from it. And there's something really refreshing and kind of sublime about just earnestly making something creating art that doesn't have a wink or a commentary baked into it. So one of my favorite musicians, too Hollis, went on the New York Times podcast and captured this dynamic in a pretty succinct way. He said, everything is a meme and ironic and a joke, and it's kind of degrading art because you can't even do anything serious anymore without people going, he's aura farming, or bro, thought this was whatever the fuck they type. and he kind of nailed it on the head there among like male audiences. I think that's how the cringe reaction is generally spoken about. there's also a quote I found from Tyler the Creator who said, I asked some friends why they don't dance in public and some said because of the fear of being filmed. it made me wonder how much of our human sphere got killed because of the fear of being a meme. So two Hollis diagnosed the problem, and I think the person who embodies the resistance is Addison Ray. I wrote about this in an essay in February of this year, 2026, called To Be Cringe is to be free. I talked about my love of her. I'm a longtime Stan and she really inspired me to get over my fear of being cringe and make my zine, which eventually became this podcast. I still ask myself what would Addison do when I have her to thank for my confidence in my own vision, I guess. I took interest in Addison during her days at the Hype House when she was just like another girl bopping and dancing around doing silly TikTok dances. those kids kinda became big characters of pop culture during the pandemic. I had literally no interest in TikTok dance videos or the Hype House or any of that stuff, but I was so struck by her joie de vive and her glittering confidence on camera. She had these big glinty eyes with clumpy mascara and this kind of badly highlighted, high school looking hair. and her style was basic. She was extremely cartoonish and happy in a way that I think a lot of people interpreted as inauthentic or corny, but I felt like it was genuine. She has this girlishness and this innocence and this wide-eyed, bushy tailed quality that I think a lot of people thought was manufactured, but it translated as real to me through the camera. And I didn't even care whether or not it was real. She just was so mesmerizing to watch and so at home on camera that I just couldn't look away. She had the facial expressions and this cheerleader like enthusiasm that you see in like seasoned showgirls. And I wondered if she had been like a competitive dancer growing up Just because she completely lacked any of the embarrassment that would sometimes cause her peers to stumble or laugh at themselves. She wasn't even the best dancer, but what set her apart in every single lineup of girls was that she seemed entirely unburdened by the crushing self-awareness that most of us suffer from after so many years of being online. I want to give heavy credit to my good friend Emma Baker, who Is over at Stargirl Podcast, which I had a guest appearance on earlier this year. She's kind of been the OG Addison correspondent since the show started in I think 2022. And that's the same year that I wrote an article about Addison for like a really small magazine. Emma was the one to really articulate it first, but we really found a lot of overlapping feelings about. our perception of Addison and she's really the first person to characterize Addison as embodied now everyone's calling her embodied. So I want to give credit where credit is due. And when she was describing Addison and another girl she talked about on podcast, she described them as the last oblivious girl. And that's how I felt about Addison. It felt like she had no awareness of discourse or any sort of canon that she was trying to get into. Everything she was doing felt super random and not well thought out, but in a way that was kind of pure. I just would watch her bounce around and think, Has she ever engaged in like a discussion online. Does she know what time it is? I don't know, but there's something so cute about it. I remember telling my friend that she had the energy of a girl perched on an inflatable flamingo at the water park. She was just like, la la la and seemed to be living in blissful bikini world all the time. And I sensed a lot of animosity and jealousy from some of the other girls in the hype house. the fact that she was such a magnetic figure, threatened them they didn't like that. And that made me like Addison more. There was just like a lightness to her spirit juxtaposed by this indulgence in her facial expressions and her body movements and her sexuality that was kind of audacious and that I found really impossible to look away from. She was the only one in that house that never stiffened or broke character when on camera. She seemed to be enjoying every opportunity to engage with the audience without any nonchalance. I felt like she wanted to deliver a show, not just to be seen. And I could tell she was fine with the viewer knowing that she wanted to be looked at. She wasn't trying to act like she was above it all. Addison kind of became known for filming herself in public and at strange times. And this really impressed me, although it did break some of the social norms that we talked about in episode one. She would film herself in Foot Locker, she would film herself on the street in LA, and she didn't really seem too concerned about. anyone's perception on the internet and in real life. And that's when I really got a sense that like she was hungry for this visibility and she was gonna do what she needed to do. But the moment I believed in her stardom full stop came after this video surfaced in February 2020 of her dancing while recording a TikTok to Kesha's song Cannibal on the street in LA. While a couple fans awkwardly wait behind her, waiting for her to finish filming so they can get a picture with her. She got so much flack for this, and everyone was saying it's so tone-deaf, you're so rude. Like, why aren't you stopping to go talk to your fans? But I thought it was honest. I thought it was funny. I thought it was cool. I thought it confirmed this like carnivorous showgirl vibe that I was suspecting that she had this drive to be seen and to have a consistent output no matter what. I remember later she said she would get paid $20 for each TikTok and she would record seven or eight TikToks every single day. I don't think she was trying to be rude and I don't think she blew those girls off in like a rude way on purpose. I think she was just like, I'm doing something, give me one second. And that simple gesture really illustrated her self-trust. She didn't panic to people please or to manage optics. She finished what she was doing. And in doing so, displayed this willingness to be misunderstood in service of her own momentum. Like she was getting those damn TikToks out no matter what. And this was something that none of her peers, even if they were technically better dancers, had. She received a remarkable. Amount of hate throughout the first years of her career. I never understood why people attacked Addison so viciously. It felt really undeserved, and she seemed like a pretty harmless college chick to me. And all the criticism around her kind of circled the word cringe. When she emerged from like the, Hype House mania of TikTok in 2020. I got the sense that there was something about her that gave people war flashbacks of high school because she was so quintessentially high school. Everything about her taste was just like basic teenage girl. She had the long, like bad die job, she had the Air Force One, she had the lightwash denim, she had the basic ass crop tops. Everything about her was so pedestrian and so maul in a way. And I've always thought Addison was extremely beautiful and super hot, but she's not like alien, beautiful, fashion, ethereal, hot. she doesn't have crazy Kardashian curves. She's not wafish and delicate. She's like muscular and healthy and beaming and full of brightness and just seems like she has a lot of blood pumping through her veins. that was really refreshing, especially 'cause I was not really giving any of that at the time. I posited that she was the victim of what I call kill the cheerleader syndrome, which is this nefarious that women sometimes project onto conventionally attractive, charismatic. Women who get a lot of male attention because they remind them of the popular girls in high school. And I think a lot of those kind of adolescent feelings of inadequacy do stick with people and persist with a lot of people through adulthood and can often calcify into this like misogynistic cattiness that I think is very unbecoming and uncool. I feel like women see Addison types as sexually threatening but also inferior because their sort of universal appeal feels kind lowbrow. Their conventionality makes them unrefined. there are many women who take issue with that and construct an identity around being refined and being aestheticize and being savvy about their image. Another thing people hated about Addison was her ordinariness and her tackiness, her maul sensibilities, everything about the way she styled herself was pedestrian. Her participation in the decidedly lowbrow hype house was pedestrian. Her family who participated in TikToks alongside her. Was also criticized for being cheesy and overly expressive and giving Costco family. There was something so unself-consciously like middle class about everything that she did. And she didn't seem ashamed enough of that or something. And I feel like people wanted her to try to elevate her taste right away, even though she was only a kid. Speaking of the mall, Addison embarked on a series of lukewarm to unsuccessful business ventures in the early 2020s while trying to make the jump from TikTok star to actual star. She had a makeup line, she had a perfume line, she had this ugly Plastic doll that was sold at Walmart that I almost bought one time. She had this odd friendship with Courtney Kardashian that seemed parasitic on both sides. she starred in this bad Netflix adaptation of She's All That, which didn't do her any favors. She had a song called Obsessed that came out that flopped. Everyone was just like, When is this girl gonna go away? I think people assume that she must not have seen how desperate it looked to post seven to eight TikToks every day to slap her name on any random mall product that came across her desk or to continue to be affiliated with the Hype House at all. As a walking representation of what was mainstream to a lot of teenagers in the 2020s, I think she was just dismissed as vapid and tasteless and annoying. And I keep coming back to this word basic. But while she was extremely ordinary at this time and didn't seem to exhibit any kind of alternative interests or tastes, I always thought there was something kind of strange about her. Just how unself conscious and unself aware she was. I thought this girl is kind of weird, even if she is basic. She is kind of a head scratcher in that I don't understand how anyone could be so unself conscious I found it kind of indicative of like a uniqueness that she had. But I think a lot of people didn't appreciate that at the time. But throughout Addison's rollout for her debut self-titled album, which came out in June of twenty twenty five, it started becoming apparent to me that she was more savvy about the marketing than people had given her credit for, or that I'd even given her credit for. I think she understood that the path to fame has always been exposure first, refinement second. And especially with algorithm as the gatekeeper, a lot of success happens from just people having a really high output and really centering themselves in the conversation just by like having this relentless presence online. So I think she understood that in order to for her to get the resources and the support to do what she actually wanted to do, she had to get the clicks first. And she even addressed what she called the ridiculous quantity of TikTok she posted in her early career when she went on podcast. She said, when I was starting this on TikTok and posting these things, it was a lot about how am I gonna get out of here? it wasn't even about let me show the intricacies of myself right now. I didn't feel like I needed to do that yet. I was like, I'm gonna make it out of here first. and she said that experience taught her that taste is a luxury. It's something don't really get to fully realize until you have the resources, until you have the people behind you. I think this kind of trust in the process and in oneself, especially in a woman and especially in public, reads as arrogance to people who are used to contorting themselves around other people's perception. But I think that's what really makes someone a star. I think what distinguishes a true star from a performer is that delusional belief in their own inevitable ascent. And it is the ability to persist, unburdened by anxiety over whether their assent is authentic or whether it's deserved. I wrote my essay about Addison That there's an extremely fine line between delusion and the power of positive thinking, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame stretches across it. I sense that Addison understood this, and it was clear that she had the nerve to drag herself across that line, regardless of how cringeworthy people seem to find it. And in the end, no one else from her TikTok milieu did that. Another quality of Addison's that people found cringe was that she always seems very thrilled to be there. And perhaps her Louisiana gentility doesn't allow for ironic detachment. perhaps enthusiasm is just a cornerstone of her personality. Definitely seems like it is. She just lacks this self-imposed distance That other celebrities disguise as humility. She doesn't pretend not to be hungry for fame, for approval, for money, for indulging herself. And this was another reason I rooted for her. I've always hated when celebrities make these statements pretending to be above it all or pretending that they don't want the attention while enacting attention-seeking behavior. It feels ungrateful. It feels insulting to the audience's intelligence. let's not forget that no one lands an agent without trying. No one reaches fame without a strategy. So for every gesture of nonchalance that a celebrity makes to try to convey relatability, there are millions of people watching who would give anything to be in their position. And I think it's cool of Addison to show up to every single event. thrilled to be there and smiling and present and engaged. It's way cooler than being aloof and trying to seem disinterested It was always clear that Addison wanted to be adored, but it doesn't feel as like sad or desperate as it does for others. she has this energy of like a little girl backstage at her school's talent show who just like cannot wait to perform. It feels like she's just Bursting with glitter, and she just needs somewhere to put it, and it's really sweet. she seems so genuinely fun and positive, and she just welcomes fame with this like sense of wonder, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I don't really get the sense that she's doing this all to fill a void. I get the sense that she just wants to perform and like put on a show for people In this very gracious, giving way. I saw her last September, I really did get that impression she's such a, as Emma from Stargirl said it, generous performer. She's seems to really love her dancers. She seems really happy to pull out all the stops and do the splits and really go for it on stage in a way that I think is super fucking cool. A note on her sex appeal, I feel the very conventionality of her sex appeal is what made her interesting and what made her off-putting to so many. her femininity is not campy. It's not laden with political commentary. It's not enhanced by a cool personal style. her hotness is the hotness of like a regular girl. she's not nearing the uncanny valley in this Instagram face cyborgian perfection. She's not trying to show everyone that she's full of all this nuance and trying to get control of the narrative. she really embodies the classical archetype of the muse. You can project onto her as you wish and She's happy that you're even considering her, really. I read this article called Climbing Cringe Mountain with Gen Z from the New York Times. in it, this creator consultant, Erica Millet, talks about how she coined the term Cringe Mountain in 2023 to describe essentially the hurdle of embarrassment you have to get over in order to produce consistent output and actually make something. You have to be okay with being disliked or misunderstood. So that those possibilities don't get in the way of you doing your thing. She said in a TikTok that everyone who is now cool or good at something has at some point had to climb cringe mountain. You have to walk up cringe mountain before you can start descending into land of cool. she talks about how she used to shrink herself to avoid criticism when posting her content online, but it just stifled her creativity and dulled her personality. So she kind of reframed the concept of climbing cringe mountain as like a trial of growth, sort of. And she decided that being cringe was actually proof that she was experimenting and taking risks. I am sensing a cultural shift away from this fear of cringe in 2026, evidenced by the like numerous think pieces about how actually to be cringe is to be free. I think a good example on the world stage of this is Timothy Chalamet's Oscar acceptance speech for the great unknown. He said, I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me. But truth is, this was five and a half years of my life. I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist. I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I think I shared the sentiment of everyone who saw that of just fuck yeah. that's awesome. That's so refreshing to see someone challenge people to measure them against. The best of the best. It's bold. It's it's scary. And I think everyone was on the same page about that being really cool. So my closing thoughts about cringe culture, it is a product of this culture of surveillance that we're all living under. And I think the best thing you can do is try not to feed into it by surveilling yourself so heavily, by censoring everything you do, and certainly not by censoring everything that others do. if you can't yet organically manufacture the confidence you need to put yourself out there over and over again, then I think you have to lead into delusion to keep yourself in kind of exploratory child mind instead of this overly rational metrics-driven mindset. That's where art goes to die. I think the curious, open, enthusiastic child understanding of your own work and of art itself is where great art comes from. You have to continue to be a student, you have to continue to learn, you to continue to put work out there, throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks. And if you think about it, most people are delusionally negative about themselves. Most people are propelled by this. tangle of deeply held negative beliefs about themselves that exists in contrast with an inflated sense of how important all these things are. like I said earlier, this is where we get the persistent feeling that everyone is watching. The thing about this era is that if you're someone who's up to the task of posting yourself online or posting your work online in a consistent way, then people are watching. It's true. I think with that added layer of scrutiny, embracing delusional positivity about yourself can only do good. I don't think most people get so overconfident by doing that. I think it just kind of cancels out some of the negativity and brings you to a level of where you can. function, if that makes sense. So if you're gonna be delusionally negative about yourself, I'm saying that you might as well be delusionally positive too and just assume that you have the sauce, that you have the keys to the kingdom and that it's only a matter of time. Like I said earlier, sometimes the second hand embarrassment elicited by something that's over the top or socially inept is warranted. And it's okay to look at yourself and your output and acknowledge that you've been a fucking cringe weirdo. It's okay. It's it's almost kind of necessary to evolve. But no matter how badly an emerging artist bungles their first five or ten or twenty attempts to make something cool and lasting, I think the confidence it takes to continue will eventually eclipse the perceived failures that they made in the beginning. If they keep an open mind And use their momentum to refine their work and eventually establish a genuine vision and a style, I think they will inevitably learn from their mistakes and get better. That goes for me and that goes for you as well. In her Rolling Stone cover story, Addison said, Whenever I look at something or hear music or watch a movie, I'm always thinking, How am I feeling watching this or looking at this? And how can I make someone feel that way whenever they look at what I make? So try to focus on that and not so much the perception. Try to focus on the quality of your work. I've been really heartened to see this year that a good pop album really does still have the power to completely change an artist's life. And it's not just about the world building and the aesthetics and all the other stuff that comes along with being a musician now. I've seen multiple times throughout this year how one genuinely great album really can propel an artist into the A list and it is still about quality in many ways. And don't let people tell you that culture's dead and everything sucks now. They just aren't looking the right places. Another thing to remember is that art loses the sparkle of spontaneity when it sits in the kiln for too long. All you can do is put in the work, trust your instincts, put that shit out, and decide that whatever you make will eventually be good. It doesn't have to be good right now. Don't spend too much time in the lab tweaking things and redoing things and deleting things. Just put your stuff out there and you will naturally learn from your mistakes and like refine your craft. When Addison was asked about her artistic process for her self-titled debut, Addison, which was so good, and my album of the summer last year, she gave this really refreshing, unpolished and very Addison answer that kind of said it all. She said, I literally just mood boarded my vibes. I literally had no music to play him at that point, so it was about trust. yes, I'm in the clouds and I enjoy being there. that's obviously a silly quote. But I think it's evocative of how Addison always says yes to her vision, to her intuition, to life. she's gonna get her ass on an elevated surface and dance. She's just here for a good time. And don't forget if you're an artist, if you're someone struggling to get their name and their face out there that it's so supposed to be fun. It's not all about perception and metrics and how it's received and like getting famous. don't let yourself stop enjoying it. I think it's pretty clear that cringe can be kind of equated with failure. and I wanna close by just touching on failure as a concept, failure as disappointment, as humiliation. I wanna read this quote from Nietzsche, who Suffered from debilitating illnesses all his life. He wrote, The human soul owes its defining tautness and depth precisely to negativity, that tension of the soul and unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its inventiveness and encouraged and enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering. We have to remember that life is not Disney World. Life is not a video game. There is not gonna be an array of stepping stones that light up every time you do something right or succeed. Life unfolds on its own terms. hardship is a feature of life. It's not a bug. You are not entitled to anything, no matter how talented or qualified you are. You are not entitled to positive reception of your work. You're not entitled to praise or positive reception of you as a person. People don't have to like what you do and That doesn't have to be the only reason for creating. millions of people are excluded from the privilege of failing. One missed paycheck and they're homeless. One falling out with a relative and they have no one. So consider yourself lucky if you are surrounded by people who permit your mistakes and choose to see your potential and your goodness underneath. It's often you acting as your corrections officer, not the people around you who just want you to be happy and try new things. Although sometimes there will be haters around you. I wanna reiterate that it is embarrassing to be seen trying and it is mortifying to be seen failing. No one wants to be witnessed slipping from their peak and tumbling into the valley below. It sucks and it makes you so conscious of your own human fallibility. But if you do shoot your shot at something and it flops, if you do fail in your execution of something that you thought was gonna be good, when you do find yourself lying on the ground, I encourage you to take a moment and just Feel the earth beneath you. dig your nails into the soil and ask yourself why you're so afraid of touching it. Practice curiosity about what the bottom has to teach you and whether you should really be so scared of it. and eventually you just gotta get back up. As long as you choose movement over stagnation, you're living. You're still getting up. Even if you're going up and down and up and down, I feel like that's better than just going at the same level. And life can feel like a series of flop eras and being cringe with only marginal success in between. But you have to remember that achievement can also feel like An assortment of successes that ultimately mean nothing. You are not software designed for quarterly upgrades. You are not going to be able to do it all or predict it all or control any of it. But you can find humility and find yourself in flopping and being cringe and getting up again. That's the whole point of life. Stop trying to outrun your desires. If you find yourself really jealous of people, investigate what it is that they have that you're convince you lack and see if you can figure out how they did it. Pick a couple people whose life you really want to have and whose work you really admire and see what they did to get to the point that they're at. if that means making short form content so people can pay attention to your writing, then that's what it means. And you have to decide if you want it badly enough. if you do want it and you are convinced that you could figure out how to make a career out of your passion happen, Then the internet presents you with a lot of opportunities to do that. We have algorithmic gatekeepers, but we don't have gatekeepers in the form of like A and R men that are as powerful as they used to be. We do have a much more democratic selection process for who gets prominence in the public eye, whose music do we connect to, whose personality do we wanna imitate, whose style do we want. don't think that everyone else around you like knows all this stuff that you don't know. A lot of people are just being strategic about the algorithm and putting shit out. That could be you and that could be me. and lastly, remember that if you're gonna stay on social media, your audience from social media is probably always going to feel like this presence over your shoulder. It's probably not gonna go away. So you might as well just give them a good show. Alright, guys, that's all I have for today. thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in to the first. video episode of Cobra Lily. I'm so excited to start uploading these as scary as it is. And yeah, I appreciate anyone who's tuning in, anyone who's spreading my podcast around. I really care about it and I depend on people like you to get any kind of emotion. So I want to express my gratitude and I will see you next time. Bye.