It’s one thing to get on a plane you think is heading to France and end up bound for North Africa. It’s another thing to post that big oops on the internet to millions of people ready to laugh and scrutinize your foolishness.
This is reportedly what happened earlier this month when two American women traveling from Rome told an airline representative they wanted a flight “to Nice,” and the employee supposedly heard them say “Tunis,” as in the capital of Tunisia. They posted the video of the sitcom-esque saga — from the pair cracking up as a flight attendant explained the error to their journey after they elected to stay on the flight — to TikTok, and it quickly went viral. While many laughed at the farce, some were left confused as to how the women made such a huge mistake. One would assume that there were a few indications at the airport that they were boarding a plane to Tunis — including the fact that they were flying on Tunisair.
The whole “To Nice” versus Tunis fiasco feels emblematic of a sort of shamelessness that seems to fuel our most-watched content these days. This past year, it seems like the primary way to be online is to be kind of embarrassing, if not fully indulge in a rising subgenre of what we can only call “embarrassment porn.”
The most obvious example is the Jet2 holiday memes where TikTok users uploaded videos of themselves getting thrown off towable tubes, surfboards, and engaging in other accidental physical comedy set to a cheery advert for the British budget airline. But that’s mortification on the fun, easy, and only-physically-harmful setting. Other entries in the genre include everything from posting about the sorry state of your marriage to announcing your lack of knowledge about a sporting event you’re attending (let alone at the very costly US Open). The past year has seen one viral TikToker eagerly share their disregard for the boundaries and norms of the therapist-client relationship, while another was willing to broadcast that they were kicked out of a party.
It raises some questions for a generation known for dictating the boundaries of what is awkward behavior and what isn’t. What exactly counts as embarrassing nowadays? Is anything truly shameful in our ever-chaotic age?
To be clear, embarrassing content is not a new phenomenon. One of the first viral offerings of the early YouTube era was a woman standing on a table in wedge heels while belting a song, and subsequently suffering a violent fall (otherwise known as “Scarlet Takes a Tumble”). The calamitous Jet2 Holiday memes mimic the decades-spanning clip show America’s Funniest Home Videos and the popular game show Wipeout. In fact, the entire genre of reality TV, dating back to the 1940s, is built on average people being humiliated via planted microphones and later planted cameras.
Cornell University professor and social researcher Brooke Erin Duffy also connects this sort of mortifying content to a bygone paparazzi culture. She says our collective glee in watching celebrities get caught looking foolish was “inflected with privilege” and had a “transactional” nature but it’s now trickled down to the average person.
“There’s always been a grotesque fascination with seeing people at their worst,” says Duffy. “The paparazzi industry was predicated on capturing the rawness and vulnerability of famous people, people not like us. It’s interesting to see how that provided precursors for this era of vulnerability and where celebrities are managing their own social media presence.”
Still, the saturation of this content hasn’t totally normalized it, as young people are simultaneously if not equally concerned with what’s socially acceptable behavior and what’s not. Nothing is seemingly more undignified than coming off as “cringe.”
In her viral 2020 video essay, YouTuber Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) describes cringe as “an electric shock, the emotional punishment for being awkward.” Cringe notably describes secondhand embarrassment by the person observing the behavior, not the feeling of shame experienced by the person doing the action. That said, cringe is relative and dependent on your environment. According to my 17-year-old-niece, markers of cringe include being a “Gen Z Trump supporter” or engaging in nerd cultures, like anime. If you look online, certain derided archetypes like “pick me’s” and “performative males” can fall under the cringe category.
When it comes to a certain age group, though, Gen Z has curated a much more specific moodboard for what’s cringe. According to various social media posts, including TikTok accounts dedicated to the aesthetic of “millennial cringe,” practically any hallmark of the late 2000s and early 2010s carries this mortifying sheen. Skinny jeans are cringe. Avocado toast is cringe. The pause before millennials start speaking in a selfie video is cringe. The Fox show Glee is cringe. The Broadway musical Hamilton is cringe. Millennials who feel targeted by these definitions might find themselves baffled to see Zoomers eagerly posting their own Ls online.
Kaley Mullin, a youth and trends insight lead at YouTube and a contributor to the newsletter Cool Shiny Culture, says that cringe often just encompasses anything that feels outdated to Gen Z. “A lot of it seems like it has to do with language and affect, slang like ‘pupper,’ ‘doggo,’ ‘but first, coffee’ seems especially ripe for Zoomer ridicule. An overly effusive, quirky affect feels like it gets dinged in the same way.”
That effusiveness speaks to the most common understanding of what causes “millennial cringe,” or possibly just cringe writ large: anything earnest. When the 2010 Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes song “Home” went viral last month after an X user declared it was the worst song ever made, it seemed to highlight an extreme level of sincerity, a disregard for seeming awkward, maybe just unabashed joy.
There’s an ungenerous way to read all of this: that being ignorant or clumsy has a social currency, but being enthusiastic and genuine does not. The reality isn’t that simple, though. Gen Z is plenty emotional and socially uncomfortable online; in fact, the current cohort of youngsters have built a reputation for crying on camera, broadcasting their angry outbursts (labeled “crash outs”), and oversharing details of their personal lives and relationships. Yet, this vulnerability is often displayed with a level of social media savviness and self-awareness. Whereas millennials, as Duffy argues, “came of age lacking a sense of social media performativity.”
This distinction, some argue, keeps these current soul-baring users from stepping into “cringe” territory.
“What’s unique and cool about Gen Z is they’re more aware that embarrassment loses its power when it’s owned and shared,” says Mullin. “Being the one to address an embarrassing thing you did by posting about it destigmatizes that thing. It turns it into an amusing anecdote versus something that keeps you up at night.”
For some, it’s even more than an amusing anecdote, it’s an opening. In 2024, when a TikTok user named Reesa Teesa shared upward of 50 videos about her experience being duped by her pathological-liar husband in a series titled “Who TF Did I Marry?,” one can at least assume she was operating partly under an awareness that there’s some sort of power, if not just attention, to be gained from publicly sharing these. For her and others, they have even resulted in career opportunities. The same can be speculated about the “To Nice vs. Tunis” girls. It’s probably not a coincidence that the poster was already a fairly successful influencer, seemingly with an understanding of what would grab her feed’s attention.
In addition to what can be gained from these moments, Duffy says that Gen Z may also feel like they have less risk in looking silly or embarrassing, specifically on an app like TikTok where posts are largely viewed by strangers because of the algorithmic system.
“On TikTok, there seems to be less of a sense of fear over what we call ‘imagined surveillance’ because you aren’t necessarily coming into contact with these people on a daily basis,” she says. “People have a following on Instagram and Facebook, but it’s kind of predicated on individuals who you come into contact with in your offline life.”
To form a theory of Gen Z cringe would probably just mean looking to Gen Alpha in the next few years. So far, it seems like they’ve mostly just accepted the trends that have been passed down to them from the past generation. A study by marketing firm Acceleration found that today’s kids are similarly interested in following average people who they perceive as relatable, as opposed to traditional, lofty celebrities.
Ultimately, in a moment where Americans are purportedly more isolated than ever before, there’s a level of capital in being someone people can see themselves in, even at the expense of looking embarrassing. “The important thing to note about posting something cringy is that it reinforces relatability in an era where relatability is everything,” Mullin says.
“Especially for influencers who are making serious money and getting amazing access to exclusive events, it’s less cool to flaunt an unattainable aspirational lifestyle and more cool to show off how starstruck you were when a celebrity walked past you,” she says.
Maybe the rise in mortifying videos is a natural changing of the tides following a decade of tightly curated, highly airbrushed Instagram posts and the initial perfection-obsessed wave of influencers. The most cringe thing for Gen Z might just be pretending that life isn’t naturally debasing.
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