Daytripper
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2017
- Messages
- 19,172
- Likes received
- 221,165
Sincerity or insincerity? Which is cringier to see online or in real life?
-
A notice about Rule 3 regarding sites hosting pirated/unauthorized content has been made. Please see here for details.
-
Staff is working to deal with the problem of synonymous tags. See here for more information and to suggest tag mergers.
-
Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
Which is more cringe?
- Thread starter Daytripper
- Start date
JohnWolfie34
(Verified Idiot) (Verified Xenophile)
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2023
- Messages
- 1,648
- Likes received
- 11,610
Insincerity is the most cringe thing to me
Daytripper
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2017
- Messages
- 19,172
- Likes received
- 221,165
But people online often shit on people (especially neurodivergent people or queer/LGBT individuals and women in general) with sincere interests in hobby.
humon
The humon abides
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2024
- Messages
- 1,658
- Likes received
- 11,182
When sincere interest in a hobby is mocked, this happens for a few reasons:
1. The people mocking are just bullies
2. The hobby itself is insincere, or it's something that's not meant to be taken seriously (like some silly cartoon, for example)
3. The sincere interest is at a level that is excessive for what a normal person (from the perspective of the people doing the mocking) would express
An example off the top of my head could be the meme of two soyjaks pointing. The origin of the meme IIRC was a photo of two guys pointing at some sign for chicken tenders or something. It's worthy of mockery because of how excited they looked about eating chicken, as if those tenders were made of gold or something. So it's cringe because normal people don't lose their composure over chicken tenders. And you wouldn't want someone who reacts like that to be, for example, part of your football team or work crew or military unit, because it would be harder to trust them not to screw something up.
It helps to understand the original purpose of mockery, which is to police deviations in culture within a social group. So you would look for signs that someone in your social group is being a little weird, maybe having unusual priorities or operating on faulty logic, and then you lampshade it and turn it into a joke, with the goal of shaming that person into conformity. And you need a certain amount of conformity to hold a social group together and make it effective in the world (think of a band of stone age hunters where one guy just wants to chase butterflies instead of tracking the animal). So that's why neurodivergent and queer people would receive more of this than usual, because they're already deviating since birth (though they can still find their own social group and ignore the haters outside of it -- and even then you can still get the same dynamics there, where some might shame others who are too straight or too "normal").
In some cases mockery can serve a good purpose in keeping a social group cohesive so that everyone is on the same page and nobody is dragging the others down. But it also breaks up a group by driving people off or by becoming an enforcement mechanism for groupthink that pulls the entire group astray (this is what happens in cults). Related to this, Tolkien said that evil can only mock and destroy (as opposed to creating anything). This would be an example of when the practice of mockery goes too far and tries to protect a maladaptive culture from being reformed from within (related to crabs in a bucket, and the reputation of Jerusalem for killing its prophets). So like with a lot of things that are part of our human evolutionary baggage, we have it for a reason, to solve problems encountered in the past, but it can also misfire in various cases and create more problems than it was meant to solve.
In short, I would just say ignore the haters and surround yourself with people who actually care about the same things you do. If someone calls you cringe, they might be right, but it's also a subjective term, and so the real question is whether you should actually care about the opinions of the people who think that way, as opposed to the people who don't.
1. The people mocking are just bullies
2. The hobby itself is insincere, or it's something that's not meant to be taken seriously (like some silly cartoon, for example)
3. The sincere interest is at a level that is excessive for what a normal person (from the perspective of the people doing the mocking) would express
An example off the top of my head could be the meme of two soyjaks pointing. The origin of the meme IIRC was a photo of two guys pointing at some sign for chicken tenders or something. It's worthy of mockery because of how excited they looked about eating chicken, as if those tenders were made of gold or something. So it's cringe because normal people don't lose their composure over chicken tenders. And you wouldn't want someone who reacts like that to be, for example, part of your football team or work crew or military unit, because it would be harder to trust them not to screw something up.
It helps to understand the original purpose of mockery, which is to police deviations in culture within a social group. So you would look for signs that someone in your social group is being a little weird, maybe having unusual priorities or operating on faulty logic, and then you lampshade it and turn it into a joke, with the goal of shaming that person into conformity. And you need a certain amount of conformity to hold a social group together and make it effective in the world (think of a band of stone age hunters where one guy just wants to chase butterflies instead of tracking the animal). So that's why neurodivergent and queer people would receive more of this than usual, because they're already deviating since birth (though they can still find their own social group and ignore the haters outside of it -- and even then you can still get the same dynamics there, where some might shame others who are too straight or too "normal").
In some cases mockery can serve a good purpose in keeping a social group cohesive so that everyone is on the same page and nobody is dragging the others down. But it also breaks up a group by driving people off or by becoming an enforcement mechanism for groupthink that pulls the entire group astray (this is what happens in cults). Related to this, Tolkien said that evil can only mock and destroy (as opposed to creating anything). This would be an example of when the practice of mockery goes too far and tries to protect a maladaptive culture from being reformed from within (related to crabs in a bucket, and the reputation of Jerusalem for killing its prophets). So like with a lot of things that are part of our human evolutionary baggage, we have it for a reason, to solve problems encountered in the past, but it can also misfire in various cases and create more problems than it was meant to solve.
In short, I would just say ignore the haters and surround yourself with people who actually care about the same things you do. If someone calls you cringe, they might be right, but it's also a subjective term, and so the real question is whether you should actually care about the opinions of the people who think that way, as opposed to the people who don't.