Millennial Cringe and Freelance Clippers

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In 2024, everyone is yearning – but what for?

Millennial commenters express a desire to rewind to that era of their lives; younger posters wish that they could have lived through it in the first place. Like “Home,” these other relics hark back to an unencumbered life outside of our performative digital panopticon. As a bit of internet-vernacular wisdom puts it, “I am cringe but I am free.”

The Revenge of Millennial Cringe

The emotion has also been intensified during the Covid crisis [7,8,9,10]. Indeed, the pandemic conditions have led to a peak in informational and fictional media consumption, but also more traditional media like board games [11]. Media are therefore not only communicative platforms of and for nostalgia, but they can also trigger it and serve to hea