Climbing cringe mountain with Gen Z

After seven years in the city, and the death of her father, she felt she was not appreciating New York the way she once had. Caught between grief and restlessness, she took a leap of faith and moved to London, documenting the entire process.

What she found on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean was not the reset she’d hoped for. Without a traditional job, she could not get approved for an apartment. Setting up a bank account or even a working phone number became a bureaucratic maze. With most of her audience in the United States, few British brands wanted to collaborate. American companies struggled to ship her products after Brexit. She pivoted to focus squarely on political content, only to find her videos performing poorly. The financial strain mounted.

It was playing out publicly, in real time. Glavan realized she was in the midst of climbing cringe mountain, a concept that has become an inescapable step of adulthood for the members of Gen Z who grew up with their entire lives — even the embarrassing stuff — being documented online.

“I’m not saying being an influencer is necessarily the hardest job in the world, but you don’t have, like, a boss or a career or any sort of feedback about what you could be doing better,” Glavan said. “It can be fairly easy when you are climbing cringe mountain to take it all out on yourself. Maybe I’m ugly, maybe I’m stupid, maybe I’m annoying, maybe my videos suck.”

The phrase cringe mountain came from Erica Mallett, 34, a creator consultant based in Sydney who coined it in 2023. Mallett spent years in the public eye, first as part of the hip-hop duo Coda Conduct and later as a host of a national breakfast show on radio station Triple J. The role put her in front of a huge audience almost overnight, and she was bombarded with texts from listeners telling her she was “so cringe.”

This idea of stumbling publicly, enduring judgment and finding resilience in the process is not new. What’s new is the language. The phrase “cringe” is distinctly of the internet age, born of comment sections and meme culture to describe acute awkwardness or social embarrassment.

At first, Mallett tried to shrink herself to avoid criticism, but it only dulled her personality and stifled her creativity. She eventually reframed the word, deciding that being cringe was actually proof she was experimenting and taking risks. To her, “climbing cringe mountain” meant growth.

“What embracing cringe allows you to do is try on a bunch of personalities, identities, outfits — but I was experimenting very publicly,” Mallett said. “They could hear that I hadn’t arrived yet at a place where I had consolidated everything that I was trying on and become someone who was clear and confident and competent. I think that makes people uncomfortable.”

Experimenting is a natural part of identity formation that did not always feel so high stakes. Today it does, even for people outside the public eye, said Roberta Katz, an anthropologist and researcher at Stanford University who was one of the authors of “Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in the Digital Age.”

According to Katz, Gen Z grew up constantly observed, with cameras everywhere and social media to amplify the scrutiny. This nonstop exposure, combined with apps built around judgment, has created a culture of digital surveillance that makes many young people hesitant to try new things or express themselves openly, lest they be called cringe.

“When I grew up, you know, I was exposed to family or church or school, but it wasn’t potentially the whole world,” Katz said. “There was gossip, there was bullying, but it was never at scale. Today, that behavior and responses to behavior can be at scale, so the significance of what happens changes.”

Glavan echoed this sentiment, stating that when she was growing up in Minnesota, she could access the internet only in a special room in her house that stored the computer. Today, she carries the internet via her phone, as well as the judgments and opinions of others, with her everywhere she goes.

Public figures have begun to push back by naming the feeling, as Mallett did.

Ocean Vuong, the poet and essayist, said recently that “cringe culture” was holding young people back. “Sincerity is something we hunger for among young people but we are embarrassed when sincerity is in the room,” he said. Bowen Yang, a comedian and a host of the “Las Culturistas” podcast, likened working on “Saturday Night Live” to climbing cringe mountain: a trial by fire of live feedback and public failure.

Musician Tyler, the Creator has taken a different tack. Celebrating his latest album “Don’t Tap the Glass,” he hosted listening parties where phones and cameras were banned. In a since-deleted Instagram post, he wrote: “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 spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme.”

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Even brands are acknowledging the stakes of putting yourself out there — a hallmark of cringe — when things could turn out poorly. Last month, Nike reworked its longtime tagline “Just Do It” into a new campaign called “Why Do It?” The ad, narrated by Tyler, the Creator, depicts athletes, many of them mid-game, as he asks why they are trying if failure is an option.

“We see this campaign as an alarm clock that wakes up this new generation and invites them to see how good they can be,” Jesse Stollak, Nike’s North America marketing vice president, said in an interview. “You can’t achieve it by thinking about it or wishing or wanting. The only way to achieve is by doing, is by taking action.”

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Reflecting on how her phrase, cringe mountain, had spread, Mallett said it was already a common feeling that was in need of a name.

“I gave them a personal mantra and maybe just an opposing excuse,” she said. “If someone goes, ‘Oh, but you shouldn’t do that.’ Now my excuse is, ‘But I can, because it’s OK.’ You can’t get to the land of cool without first climbing cringe mountain.”