Somewhere between the rise of TikTok and the flood of “get ready with me” tutorials, posing a threat to an entire generation to lose their ability to be bad at something in public as “cringe culture” built the wall.
Once just a verb for physical discomfort or embarrassment, “cringe” became a slang term for anything uncool, awkward or embarrassing and it spread from online forums into classrooms, where teachers noticed students growing more self-conscious about visibly putting in effort. A behavior now mocked online as “tryharding.”
What changed the stakes was permanence. According to psychologist Aastha Lakhey, a single video or comment can now be replayed and judged long after the moment passed. What once used to fade, turned into a permanent record, especially in social media
New York University professor, acclaimed author, and poet Ocean Vuong, recalled that he himself has watched this play out in his own classroom, wherein his students had grown “more and more self-conscious about trying.”
This shift, he said, was bleeding directly into their creative work, describing cringe culture as a quiet form of social policing that rewards effortlessness over effort.
Filipino social media didn’t need cringe culture to invent public shame. Severely ingrained in the Filipino psyche is crab mentality, the tendency to pull down anyone who steps out or tries too hard, layered with hiya, the discomfort of being shamed in front of others.
Cringe culture didn’t replace that instinct—but rather gave it a bigger stage. TikTok’s “Filipino cringe” tag hosts a steady stream of Filipinos mocking each other’s dance trends, accents, and slip-ups, often for laughs, but built on the same reflex.
Catch someone visibly trying, and joke about it before anyone else does.
However, on the bright side, not every local moment tipped toward mockery. When students spontaneously gathered after a class suspension for an impromptu dance-off, the reaction skewed toward nostalgia rather than ridicule, proof that a public, unpolished moment of just trying could still go viral for the right reasons.
None of it means Filipino talent is disappearing. It means the space to build and foster talent and creativity while allowing flaws and imperfection keeps shrinking.
The fix isn’t pretending cringe doesn’t exist. What it takes is people actually choosing to make room for it. That could mean treating a shaky first attempt as part of the process. It could be simple as friends, parents, or teachers cheering someone’s visible effort instead of quietly labeling it as “cringe.”
The point was never to raise a generation that’s immune to embarrassment, it’s to raise one that no longer has to shrink themselves just to avoid it.
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