Sidekicks, Tumblr and the Inevitability of Cringe: Making the Case for Zoomers to Embrace It

I feel like this goes without saying, but I’mma say it anyway: every generation thinks they’re cooler than the one before them. It’s as inevitable as death and taxes. The youths look at the adults ahead of them and decide everything they wear, say and enjoy is embarrassing—or, in this case, cheugy or cringe. Then, before they know it, a younger generation comes along and returns the favor.

It is a canon event that nobody escapes.

Which is why, whenever I come across a video of a Zoomer lecturing us olds about how the almond nails I love, the side part I rock and the eyeliner I draw all date me—and then offering a tutorial on how not to look old—I mean this with peace and love, but baby, I don’t care. I laugh and roll my eyes, not because I’m offended, but because I know what’s coming for them.

Because it comes for all of us.

There seems to be this idea that being associated with your own generation is some kind of personal failure. Like you should be constantly updating yourself so no one can detect that you existed before the current trend cycle. And I can’t help but wonder: why?

There is no hiding that I am, well…a millennial.

BBG, I was there for MySpace. Tumblr. The Valencia filter, back when Instagram was still a photo-sharing app. The Snapchat dog filter. Kandee Johnson turning herself into Barbie in a YouTube tutorial. Scene kids. Hot Topic when it was still Hot Topic and not this weird licensing hellscape of random IP. All those bands you love because your older sister or brother played them for you?

I was at Warped Tour with them.

These are the exact things you worship, romanticize and cosplay now. And listen, that’s cool with me. But respect your elders and stop trying to update me. Wouldn’t it be more cringe if I were pretending to be Gen Z?

Although, I do need to add that my adopted Gen Z daughters have named me an honorary Zoomer because I’m not a regular mom. I’m a cool mom. A millennial reference. 😉

But in all honesty, I wish Gen Z would embrace their own cringe now instead of exhausting themselves trying to avoid it. It is inevitable. You might as well go all out, bruh.

Wear the thing. Do the dance. Take the ridiculous photo. Scream the lyrics. Be goobers with your friends. Let yourself look stupid when you are having fun. One day, the things you currently consider completely normal will become the punch line of another generation’s videos. You cannot outmaneuver time. Gen Beta will eventually make fun of Gen Alpha, and whoever comes next will find something humiliating about Gen Beta. The cycle will continue long after all of us have lost track of what the younger generations are even called.

I hope that when it happens, you can laugh and say, “You just had to be there.”

Because that is really what generational nostalgia is: you had to be there.

You had to understand why flipping open a Sidekick felt so satisfying. I remember when being online was somewhere you went rather than the permanent condition of being alive. You had to hear the AOL sounds and know someone had just signed onto AIM. You had to carefully curate your AIM away message so one specific person would see it and understand that the TBS lyric—“The truth is you could slit my throat / And with my one last gasping breath / I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt”—was absolutely about them.

Such a good song.

You had to know what life felt like before the internet lived inside your phone and what it felt like immediately afterward.

Sometimes I wonder whether my parents feel a little sad about the world I grew up in, because I feel that way about Gen Z. I think about social media existing when I was in high school and how brutal that must be. You’re already insecure and trying to figure out friendships, breakups, your body and who the hell you even are—and now you also have to worry about how many likes your photo gets? Everything feels enormous in high school. I had Victoria’s Secret catalogs to compare myself to. Now the popular girl gets to reign over the hallways and TikTok? 🫪 Ug. I have a soft spot for the Zoomers. That shit must suck. At an age when you are still forming your identity, you are already being conditioned to perform it on a global stage. That is a lot of pressure.

Maybe that is why being perceived seems to carry so much more weight now.

I remember when being online was somewhere you went rather than the permanent condition of being alive.

There are parts of that time I romanticize because they belong to me. My parents do the same thing with their youth. My father was born in the 1950s and my mother in the 1960s, and I love looking at their old photos. My grandmother with a giant beehive. My dad as a teenage boy in a leather jacket looking like a little angsty rockabilly teen. My parents dressed in fresh seventies clothes after coming to New York. The dance halls, the music, everyone gathering with their cousins.

It all looks so beautiful to me.

But I did not live it.

I can admire the photographs without fully understanding the texture of that time. I did not experience its ordinary days, its limitations or the things people conveniently leave out when they tell stories about how much better everything used to be. Every generation remembers the music, the fashion and the moments of freedom. Memory puts a flattering filter over the rest. I mean, New York in the seventies and eighties was rough. The photos may look incredible, but nostalgia has a very selective memory.

Millennials do it too. We remember the Sidekick, but we also lived through the 2008 financial crash. September 11th. The start of the Iraq War. We remember Myspace Top 8s and angled selfies taken with our digital cameras, but we were also part of the transition into a world where everyone could be recorded at any time. WorldStar turned filming other people’s worst moments into entertainment long before every person had a content strategy. Cable news had already learned that if it bleeds, it leads. Social media simply handed the camera to everyone else.

Now we are online more than ever. Everyone is watching everyone, and everyone knows they could become content.

I think that constant awareness has changed the way people behave in public. It has changed how we relate to one another, for sure. There has been a lot of conversation about Gen Z not dancing in clubs or appearing afraid to fully let loose. Obviously, that does not describe every Zoomer, but I understand where the observation comes from. It is difficult to surrender to a moment when part of your brain is wondering how you will look if someone starts recording and posts it for views.

Millennials will respond by saying, “Girl, I was in the club in my office clothes and heels, shaking ass after work.” And yes, we were. But we were not necessarily more evolved. We were simply less aware of ourselves as potential footage.

There is now pressure to treat yourself like a brand at all times. Even your spontaneous moments can be captured, uploaded, dissected and detached from their original context. People are constantly anticipating the judgment of an invisible audience. Is this outfit embarrassing? Is this dance embarrassing? Is liking this song embarrassing? Am I standing correctly? Do I look like I am trying too hard? Do I look like I am not trying hard enough?

That sounds exhausting.

We’ve all become addicted to the slot machine of numbers on social media. There is now a tangible score attached to how popular, interesting or desirable you appear to be. That has to affect how we relate to one another and how willing we are to be ourselves when other people are watching.

The funny part is that Gen Z was also the first generation to truly perfect being wildly TMI online. Millennials posted cryptic lyrics, curated Instagram feeds and vague Facebook statuses. Gen Z turned personal catastrophe into a serialized content format.

“Get ready with me while I confront my boyfriend for cheating on me with my stepmom.”

Perhaps some things should have stayed in the drafts. Then again, the rest of us were seated, so who am I to interfere with the arts?

That will be part of your generational cringe too. One day, younger people are going to look back at the era of tearful story times, relationship confrontations, livestreamed breakdowns and eleven-part exposés and ask why everyone was sharing that much information with strangers. You may defend it. You may deny participating. You may insist that it was different when you did it.

Welcome. This is how it begins.

And remember, BB: the pendulum always swings.

I mean, never in my life did I think Trisha Paytas—blndsundoll4mj herself—would have this kind of comeback and win over Gen Z. But they loved how real, raw and unapologetic she was, which was a complete rejection of the perfectly curated, Photoshopped images and videos everyone else was posting. The exact qualities that made her an outcast to parts of her own generation eventually became her hero content.

Honestly, it has been nice to watch her dreams literally come true. Dude, she was on Broadway. Sold-out tours. The kind of career moments people would have laughed at her for believing were possible years ago. Her delusional, unwavering faith in herself is inspiring. She is the embodiment of: why not me?

I digress.

There will always be nuance, of course. Every generation inherits a different world. Gen Z grew up with social media as part of its basic social infrastructure. Millennials remember the transition. Our parents remember a world before any of it. None of those experiences makes one generation inherently better than another. They simply create different instincts, references and coping mechanisms.

But trying to scrub away every trace of your own time will not keep you young. It will only make you scared of being seen.

I do not want to live like that. I do not want to spend my life negotiating against the things that make me happy because someone younger might consider them dated. I have earned my references. I have earned the right to look at a photograph from a night that would probably seem embarrassing now and remember exactly how alive I felt when it was taken.

One day, I hope you reach my age—and beyond—and have young whippersnappers making fun of something you still love. I hope you laugh because they do not understand. I hope you have memories that cannot be fully translated for them. I hope you can look back at your own questionable fashion, oversharing and cultural nonsense with affection instead of shame.

I hope you can say, “You just had to be there.”

Because you did. And that is the point.

Being cringe means you participated. It means you belonged to a moment before anyone knew what that moment would eventually become. It means you cared too much, posted too much, wore something that later looked ridiculous and had fun before the internet decided whether you were doing it correctly.

You are going to age out of being culturally untouchable. We all do. So stop trying to avoid the canon event.

Be cringe. Be happy. Give the next generation something to make fun of.

besitos xx