Why is joy embarrassing?

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

Over on tumblr, I said that cringe is just being embarrassed for someone else who doesn't feel embarrassed about their own joy. But then I asked the question, "Why is joy embarrassing?"

I wasn't actually trying to be that deep. I mean, it was a legitimate question, but I wasn't planning on answering it. But now that I'm thinking about it, I actually want to know.

Why is joy embarrassing?

I think part of it is that external viewpoint. You're watching someone experience such a strong emotion, and they're doing it nakedly - without hiding it at all. We're all used to keeping a veil over that kind of thing on a day to day basis. You can only show your honest emotions on special occasions or in private.

But "cringe" behaviour is public. It's there for anyone to see. Family, friends, strangers - you're allowing all of them to watch you filled with and expressing your emotion.

When someone is crying and we feel an emotional response to their pain, we call it empathy. When someone is angry and we feel an emotional response to that anger, we call that fear. But when someone is experiencing joy, we call our emotional response cringe and recoil away from it.

I don't want to run away from joy. I want to embrace it. I want them to share it with me and pull me under the umbrella of it. Let me warm myself with your joy against the cold, dark cruelty of the world.

I don't want to snuff that flame. I want to fan it. Turn it into an inferno. The world is crap enough. Let's let the happiness in when we can.

Comments

[laurelwisp]

I know in my own case, when I catch myself having those feelings, a lot of the time it's sort of secondhand embarrassment. Not exactly in the way that term is usually used, but sort of..."oh, this is not an Accepted Thing, you're going to get hurt" when someone is excited about a Wrong Thing (certain cartoons or Youtubers I could mention), or "oh you're going to be really embarrassed you did this in a few years" such as my cousin's very "stereotypical teenaged girl" love of BTS. Because I look back on when I used to engage in these things in the same way and I cringe at myself--though, like you said, there is the idea that you're jealous that you yourself, or someone else, could enjoy something fully and completely without feeling bad about it.

We do spend a lot of our lives getting told to tone it down, especially those of us who tend to be too enthusiastic about liking things and don't realize when we're going overboard. I wonder if that has something to do with it.

[slashfairy]

well said.

[(Anonymous)]

i realize i cringe most strongly at my past self. im pretty sure it's a trauma thing for me, i got made fun of for my interests and infodumping about them a lot. in therapy i learned that it might help to extend to my past self the same kind of empathy/compassion/whatever that i extend to others. because even people ive met and thought were cringe, once i got to know and understand them, i realized were for the most part cool fucking people who just like to have fun!

[unlovablehand]

Whenever I cringe, at myself or others, it's a self protective reaction. I feel like my train of thought is always "how can you allow yourself to be so openly vulnerable".

Like that 'mortifying ordeal of being known' meme? Expressing joy offers such a clear, unrestrained view of someone's personal inner world that my brain reads it as a giant soft spot to be armored asap. It's probably why I mostly cringe at myself, tbh.

[ms_katonic]

I never really got cringe culture and I think this might be why - I never found joy embarrassing. Joy's precious and we should make the most of it while we can, why would I begrudge it in another?

Of course, it also helped that I got into fandom as an adult and was past the teenage need to be seen as cool at all times. Suspect a lot of cringe culture's main adherents are still very much in that phase, and anyone who hates fandom will be all too keen to weaponise that.

[pikkugen]

There are few things I like more than seeing people who really enjoy themselves and who are contagiously excited about what they're doing. Then again I have a lot of non-neurotypical friends and I'm starting to wonder (at the ripe age of 44) that I might be somewhere on the scale myself, so not caring (much) about other people's cringe is something of a second nature to me. Then again I'm somewhat skilled in choosing the people I gush about MY things, so maybe I'm just lucky. I just wish every little teen had someone to talk with about all their favorite things, no matter how "cringe".

[touchingaheart]

This cringe feeling is even more enhanced in Asian cultures, or at least in my country. You'd hear someone laugh out loud on the train, or a couple of people chattering happily together at their table in a restaurant, or you see someone kissing their partner's cheek on the sidewalk, or two people exclaiming happily when they run into each other--and for some reason, the instinctive reaction would be 'ugh' and a roll of the eyes, or some form of disapproval.

Like it's shameful to see people's joy and happiness and those people experiencing it should be ashamed for exposing it to strangers.

Out in the world, for some reason there's some kind of weird unspoken agreement that you can't show too much of your feelings in public--the degree may vary according to the country but its the same in spirit. I can't for the life or me guess why, but I recognise that feeling when I see a group of teenagers giggling together in the back of the bus. A response of 'how dare they show that in public' because,naturally, eeveryone should be calm and quiet in public as to not bother other people.

Which is what it boils down to, I guess? That it's somehow a form of respect to conceal everything, not just joy but pain and anger and sadness too,so other people won't be bothered by it. As if having those emotions are a bother. And it doesn't escape me that this disapproval is usually directed at teenagers and youth, those who are too old to cling to their mother's skirts and therefore can be dismissed as childish, but not old enough to have absorbed those well-worn opinions of the composed elders.

I don't really know what I want to say haha. My whole life I've been hushed and told to be quiet or to lower my voice whenever I get (apparently) too excited or laughing too loud, and I feel that disapproval keenly. I've always asked myself at those times why it's bad that I'm laughing, and then realise that I'm beginning to feel that disapproval inside me when I see OTHER people, usually young, publically displaying any form of emotion.

I could say it's because you shouldn't show your happiness in case other people don't have it as good, so it's rude to show 'you're better'. It sounds stupid but it feels pretty correct. It allows the so-called 'better people' to feel good about themselves at the same time. Mostly, the better people are the wealthy, I'd say.

I think that attitude carries over into other parts of life. Happily gushing about your boyfriend or a gift you got or what you liked about a show--it's always met with disapproval and a sort of high-nosed frowny faced head-shaking reaction.

I'm rambling coz it's late ^^;; but I do think it's sad that I can't quite shake off that innate reaction of 'ugh do they have to be so public' when really, I think it's great when someone's happy. We're definitely living in a world right now where there's not much joy to spare.

[alias_chan]

For me it's definitely... Idk a feeling of mutual danger. Stuff I feel secondhand embarrassment about is entirely things I've been harmed for doing before, or know people will harm you for doing if I haven't gotten that unlucky myself - the more strongly I feel it, the worse I was harmed generally. So I get a combination of "I'm standing near this person, I might be attacked, too" and "wow they don't know this is dangerous, I need to protect them."

But I've been training myself over time to not be the dangerous one. Yeah there's a non-zero chance someone hurts them for being "cringey," a high chance for some things, but I refuse to be the one hurting them.

And a lot of times, the ways we try to stop people from doing things are themselves harmful - you can't protect someone from harm by locking them in a windowless room, that's not how this works. You can warn them about the danger if there's specific dangers - "hey, that queen bee might attack you if you do that in her line of sight" or "hey, this area's violently transphobic, do you want help going stealth" - but esp for social/ psychological and for vague dangers, a warning can itself cause harm, because you risk reinforcing "this is a Bad Thing to do."

But when you're having a trauma response, it can be hard to stop and sort out what this feeling is.

I think there's also a second element of "cringe," though, that I think hasn't been mentioned as much, which is when someone's being kinda just. Genuinely obnoxious. And it's not second hand embarrassment, it's "could you PLEASE not do that near me." But, again, if you have low self awareness or low ability to cope with people being obnoxious, it can be really easy to go "this person is doing something objectively wrong and I need to stop them," even subconsciously.

And annoyingness is subjective, extremely so, and also like - being annoyed is roughly harmless, and I think it's actually much better overall to develop a high tolerance for being annoyed and an ability to not lash out when annoyed, than to go "being annoyed is bad, because thing is harmless, so I shouldn't." Desensitize yourself to obnoxious people, don't put yourself in a bubble where you never encounter obnoxious people, b/c then you're more likely to lash out when you inevitably do meet someone who just grinds your gears.

(There are people who're more consistently annoying to a broader group of the population, and that also has a lot of overlap with "is Extremely Into Things" b/c "is consistently annoying" does correlate with bad social skills/ ability to tell when someone's getting annoyed and back off, which correlates with tendency to be extremely into things. Which can end up conflated in your head very easily, until you get annoyed just hearing whatever thing mentioned.)

But, like, if you're annoyed, the solution is to practice your own social skills and communicate like an adult. Don't be passive aggressive, don't escalate until person leaves - set clear boundaries at them, and agree on ways to flag shifting boundaries (or just block them if in a situation where that's feasible). And acknowledge to yourself that you finding them annoying doesn't super reflect on you - especially if they aren't even interacting with you, you're just finding the way they type when interacting with other people annoying. (This is a great use case for blocking.)

(There can also be competing access needs esp in person wrt like, if someone's very excited about a thing and is being talkative and loud, that can be extremely bad for someone who's currently extremely sensitive to loud noises, and/or who is having a mental health and needs to not be perceived or interacted with - I've definitely been followed around by people who were very excited about a thing and would not stop talking to me, and I was either in a situation where I couldn't safely tell them to fuck off, or I'd tell them to leave me alone But Politely and they wouldn't parse "politely, fuck off" as a request to stop talking (then would get extremely upset if I dropped the politeness, which makes it very hard to enforce boundaries at them), or they'd stop talking then start again thirty minutes later. And this can very easily prime me to be annoyed about the topics they were talking about.)

(Someone triggering second hand embarrassment - esp persistently - can also be itself annoying, since "anger" is a very common reaction to Bad Feels esp with trauma. And then you can be embarrassed about being annoyed, and get annoyed about that... And "make other person's behavior about you" is ime a lot easier to accidentally do when you're annoyed.)

So, uh, long ramble in summary - I think it isn't centrally that joy's embarrassing? Though that's part of it, as a wider cultural thing (especially that can trigger initial trauma wrt protective-trauma-reactions). But a lot of it is that... We're not really taught how to handle interpersonal friction very well. We're not taught how to distance ourselves from unpleasant situations without harming ourselves ("just avoid them" doesn't really work if doing that loses you your entire social group). We're not really taught how to calmly and non-harmfully bring up "hey can you not do that," or how to listen to those requests. We're not taught how to process and deal with our own trauma, or how to not lash out at others about our trauma reactions. We're not taught how to be understanding, or how to go "their behavior isn't about me," or how to forgive - we're told to, but I, for one, was never told how, and these are not intuitive skills.

And cringe really is a mixture of "this person is annoying" and "this person is giving me second hand embarrassment" ime.

[justapotatowriter]

Sometimes I wonder if the embarrassment part is just my own anxiety acting up for someone else. I mean, I feel anxious for characters in fics to the point where I might need to put the fic aside and mentally prepare myself for it, so I probably feel the same for people.