As with love and hate, however, the line between cringe and cool is a notoriously difficult one to recognize. The pursuit of one can, paradoxically, nurture or hinder the other. This is something a friend of mine pointed out recently. “People who are ‘cool’ don’t care about being cool,” she told me, matter-of-factly, over the phone. “I feel like when I was younger and a lot more preoccupied with ‘being cool,’ that was actually more cringe-y, if you know what I mean. It’s like you can only truly be cool if you drop any preconceived ideas about what that means. So ‘cringe’ and ‘cool’ are basically the same thing once you boil it down.”
I know what my friend is saying. Both rely on authenticity and caring less—and on removing a vague sense of desperation to be liked. But I’d argue that while “embrace cringe” presupposes a kind of earnestness, enthusiasm, and relatability, coolness is a much more ineffable quality based on more than just backing yourself. It’s tied up with other things—like charm, style, and sensuality—characteristics that can and do hold value, even if they’re not always attainable, or the most important thing in the world.
Last year, following the death of Joan Didion, Gawker published a piece titled “The Death of Cool.” In it, the writer argues that, though coolness has superficial aspects—Didion looking unimpressed while smoking cigarettes in sunglasses, for example—there are also deeper aspects of cool that don’t necessarily fit into today’s society: “Cool is also a virtue… and one that’s being lost by the contemporary cultural demand to emote, to declaim or to comment incessantly.” In other words, modern society expects us to have constant opinions, to be constantly seen, to reject cynicism in favor of a kind of valiant enthusiasm and relatability. (And yes, I understand the irony of my writing a whole opinion piece about this.)
For some, the word “cool” might also be synonymous with pretentiousness. But can there not be value or fun in pretentiousness? Think of the scarlet lipstick, neon jukeboxes, and weird haircuts of Wong Kar-wai movies. Or the absurd fever dream of Titane. Or the meticulous and minimal box-cut style of everyone in Tár. Think of Rihanna in Barbie-pink gloves, shooting a gun into the sky. Or of Sky Ferreira, lids half closed in boredom, barely singing “Everything Is Embarrassing.” While pretentiousness might be a dirty word for a lot of British people, wouldn’t life be dull without it? Wouldn’t life be a sea of Ed Sheerans earnestly singing about their relatable feelings, or yet another wide-eyed couple speaking about attachment styles on TikTok?
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