What is the cost of meta-cringe?
Kids are not failing by wanting to be cottagecore or meatcore or this new preppy. It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning. Kids, in all their blowzy creativity — the same creativity that invented movements from Romanticism to hippiedom to
... See morehttps://www.nytimes.com/by/mireille-silcoff • Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids.
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
Kids are not failing by wanting to be cottagecore or meatcore or this new preppy. It’s the culture available to them that is failing, by no longer being able to connect any of these categories with lived experience or social meaning.