What’s the aspirational cringe economy, and why should you care?

There are two types of people in this world:

1. Those who hate watch certain content

2. Liars.

We’ve all done it.

Watching a YouTuber’s family vlog where every dinner looks like a hostage negotiation. Or scrolling through a LinkedIn post where a guy earnestly explains how waking up at 4am + cold showers enabled him to make X amount of dollars (spoiler: it didn’t).

You cringe, you roll your eyes, and then… you watch the next one lol.

This is the aspirational cringe economy, where being painfully watchable is just as powerful as being genuinely aspirational.

The mechanics are simple. Influencers and brands have realised that attention is attention. If people are hate-following, quote-tweeting, or leaving comments that basically say “I can’t believe you posted this,” guess what? That’s engagement. And engagement equals reach.

Your disgust fuels the algorithm in the same way as your admiration. Crazy how that works, huh?

Think back to TikTok circa 2020. The dangly earring guys. The lip-biting thirst traps. The clout houses with their kitchen dances. It gives me second hand embarrassment just thinking about the level of peak cringe.

And yet, everybody kept watching. It was like driving past a trainwreck you just couldn’t look away from.

What’s insane is even after the collective internet decided it was cringe, those creators didn’t fade. They maintained notoriety for years, precisely because cringe is sticky. The mockery and eye-rolls kept their names circulating, turning embarrassment into longevity. And likely dollars for those creators.

There’s also, a kind of strange comfort in cringe.

Watching someone fumble through a corny af dance or show off a painfully curated “day in the life” makes us feel superior (don’t lie, you know it does), but also a little curious.

What if it works for them? Obviously, it is working. I mean, look at their view. Insane. Should I be doing that? Can I even do that? Wait no. Wtf am I thinking? I’d never do that. Unless…?

Cringe turns into a guilty form of aspiration: I’d never film myself like this. But maybe I do want the 10-step skincare routine, the productivity hack, the colour-coded pantry. Maybe I even want to be a 20-something year old in a house full of friends doing sweet f*ck all, getting brand deals out the wazoo.

This is why cringe sticks. It’s not just embarrassment, but proximity to desire.

You hate-watch because you can’t look away. Because some part of you wants what they’re selling, even if you’d never admit it out loud. And oop, am I in your head again? Sorry ‘bout that.

For marketers, the cringe economy is both a trap and a tool. On one hand, leaning into irony can keep you relevant (see: Duolingo’s unhinged TikToks). On the other, if your brand is accidentally serving cringe, you risk being meme’d into oblivion. The line between “playful self-awareness” and “everyone is roasting you” is thinner than ever.

I guess the takeaway is to not fear cringe—it’s part of the cultural circuit.

But don’t mistake hate-watching for true loyalty. If your strategy is built on being embarrassing enough to be shareable, it might get you short-term reach. Long-term? You’ll be remembered as a punchline. And that punchline usually sounds like ‘womp womp.’

In other words, embrace a little cringe. To be cringe is to be free. Just make sure there’s something underneath it worth aspiring to.

-Sophie Randell, Writer