There’s a particular type of TikTok that’s become unavoidable: someone does something embarrassing, films their own mortified reaction, and posts it with a caption like “why am I like this” or “i want to disappear.” The comments flood in with “this is so relatable” and “i would simply pass away.” The video gets millions of views. The creator gains followers. Somehow, being a disaster has become a personal brand.
Welcome to the era where cringe is currency, and your most embarrassing moments might be your most valuable content.
The Old Rules of Cool
Let’s rewind for a second. For millennials and generations before them, being cool meant seeming like you had it together. You weren’t supposed to show effort. You definitely weren’t supposed to broadcast your failures. Social media in its early days reflected this—people posted their best photos, their biggest accomplishments, their most curated selves.
The goal was aspiration. You wanted people to see you as successful, attractive, put-together. Being awkward or embarrassing was something to hide, not something to advertise. If you did something cringey, you certainly didn’t film it and share it with thousands of people.
But somewhere along the way, Gen Z looked at that performance of perfection and said, “Actually, this seems exhausting and fake. What if we just… didn’t?”
The Authenticity Economy
The shift toward embracing awkwardness isn’t random—it’s a direct response to influencer culture. After years of watching people present impossibly perfect lives, young people started craving something real. And nothing feels more real than someone being genuinely, painfully awkward.
This created a new kind of social currency. Instead of trying to look cool, the goal became trying to look real. And what’s more universally real than feeling awkward? Everyone has experienced the specific horror of replaying an embarrassing interaction in their head at 2 AM. When someone posts about that exact feeling, it creates an instant connection.
The comments on these posts are revealing. They’re not people laughing at the creator—they’re people relating so hard they’re practically having a shared anxiety attack. “Not you calling her ‘mom’ accidentally,” says one comment. “I WOULD HAVE MOVED COUNTRIES,” says another. The awkwardness becomes a bonding experience.
Monetizing the Mess
Here’s where things get interesting: this embrace of awkwardness has become genuinely profitable. Creators have built entire platforms around being disasters. There are influencers whose whole brand is social anxiety, others who specialize in documenting their dating failures, and still others who’ve built audiences by sharing their most embarrassing work moments.
This awkwardness isn’t just getting views—it’s getting sponsorships. Brands have caught on that authenticity sells, and what feels more authentic than someone who seems genuinely messy? You’re more likely to trust a product recommendation from someone who films themselves dropping an entire smoothie on their white couch than from someone whose life looks suspiciously perfect.
The comedy industry has picked up on this too. Stand-up comedians in their twenties are increasingly building their sets around being anxious disasters rather than confident observers. The whole “I don’t have my life together and that’s my entire personality” thing has become a legitimate career path.
The Performance of Authenticity
But here’s the complicated part: once awkwardness becomes a brand, is it still authentic? When someone films themselves having an awkward moment, edits the video, writes a caption, and posts it strategically for maximum engagement, at what point does it stop being genuine vulnerability and start being content strategy?
This is the paradox at the heart of the cringe-to-currency pipeline. The appeal of these posts is that they feel unfiltered and real. But creating content that consistently feels unfiltered requires a lot of filtering. You’re still performing—you’re just performing authenticity instead of perfection.
Some creators have gotten incredibly savvy about this. They know exactly what kind of awkward moment will resonate with their audience. They understand the formula: specific enough to feel real, universal enough to be relatable, embarrassing enough to be entertaining but not so mortifying that it’s uncomfortable to watch.
When Everyone’s Awkward, Nobody Is
There’s also something worth noting about what happens when awkwardness becomes the norm. If everyone’s brand is being a lovable disaster, does it lose its meaning? Are we actually embracing our genuine messiness, or have we just created a new set of expectations about how to perform being “real”?
The pressure to have an authentic brand of awkwardness can be just as intense as the old pressure to seem perfect. Now instead of curating perfect vacation photos, you’re curating perfectly relatable failures. You’re still thinking about how things will play to an audience, just with different aesthetics.
This can create a weird situation where people feel pressure to be more awkward than they actually are, or to manufacture embarrassing moments for content. The line between “this genuinely happened to me” and “I kind of made this happen so I could post about it” gets blurry.
The Mental Health Angle
There’s a more serious dimension to this trend that’s worth considering. For many young people, posting about awkwardness and anxiety isn’t just about being relatable—it’s a genuine coping mechanism. Turning your most embarrassing moments into content can be a way of processing them, of taking back control of the narrative.
When you post about an awkward interaction and hundreds of people respond with “literally same,” it validates your experience. It reminds you that you’re not uniquely terrible—you’re just human. There’s something genuinely therapeutic about that.
But there’s also a risk. When your awkwardness becomes your brand, there’s pressure to stay awkward. What happens when you grow, when you become more confident, when you actually start getting your life together? Does that betray your audience? Do you need to stay stuck to stay relatable?
Some creators have talked about feeling trapped by their awkward disaster persona, unable to post about genuine accomplishments without their audience being confused or disappointed. Your brand becomes a cage, even when it’s a brand built on being “authentically” yourself.
The Gen Z Difference
So why is this particularly a Gen Z thing? Older generations have been awkward too—they just handled it differently. Several factors seem to be at play.
First, Gen Z grew up with social media as a constant presence. They’ve watched the evolution from highlight reels to “authentic” content and learned to be suspicious of anything that looks too polished. They have finely tuned BS detectors for performative perfection.
Second, Gen Z entered young adulthood during uniquely unstable times. Coming of age during a pandemic, economic uncertainty, and climate anxiety has created a generational mindset of “nothing makes sense anyway, might as well be honest about the chaos.” Pretending to have it all figured out feels especially ridiculous when the world itself clearly doesn’t.
Third, there’s a generational comfort with documenting everything. For Gen Z, filming yourself experiencing something isn’t separate from the experience—it’s part of how you process life. This makes capturing awkward moments feel natural rather than calculated.
Finding the Balance
So how do you navigate this landscape? How do you be genuinely yourself without turning your personality into content?
Maybe the answer is being intentional about what you share and why. There’s a difference between posting something because you genuinely want to connect with others over a shared experience and posting something because you know it will perform well algorithmically. Both are valid, but it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one you’re doing.
It’s also worth remembering that you don’t owe anyone your embarrassing moments. Just because awkwardness is trending doesn’t mean you need to broadcast yours. Some things can just be experiences you have, stories you tell your friends, moments you laugh about privately.
The Bigger Picture
The shift from performing perfection to performing awkwardness reveals something about how young people are trying to rebel against the impossible standards set by earlier social media. If the game is rigged and nobody can actually achieve the perfect life that influencers portrayed, why not flip the script entirely?
There’s something genuinely revolutionary about refusing to pretend you have it all together. In a culture that demands constant optimization and improvement, admitting you’re kind of a mess is an act of resistance.
But like all trends, this one is complicated. Awkwardness as a brand can be freeing, but it can also be limiting. It can help you connect with others, but it can also trap you in a persona. It can be authentic, but it can also be performed.
The reality is probably that most of us exist somewhere in the middle—sometimes genuinely awkward, sometimes performing awkwardness, sometimes actually having our lives together for brief moments but not wanting to jinx it by saying so.
Maybe the healthiest approach is to remember that your value as a person isn’t dependent on how relatable your failures are or how perfectly you can package your imperfections. You’re allowed to be awkward without making it content. You’re allowed to be successful without feeling like you’re betraying your brand.
The most authentic version of yourself might be the one nobody sees—the one that exists without an audience, without strategy, without the pressure to be consistently anything. That version gets to be awkward or confident or put-together or a complete mess without worrying about whether it’s on-brand.
And honestly? That sounds pretty freeing.