Someone shares an idea. Not a perfect idea, maybe not even a good one, but a sincere one. They've thought about something, and they want to offer it. Watch what happens next. In certain spaces—comment sections, group chats, anywhere anonymity meets audience—a specific response emerges. Not disagreement. Not critique. Contempt. The word that surfaces most often is "cringe."
This is worth examining. Not the ideas being shared, but the contempt itself. What is it, exactly, that someone finds so unbearable about watching another person try?
The cringe response isn't about quality. Poorly-executed cynicism rarely triggers it. What triggers it is earnestness—the visible evidence that someone cares, that they've invested themselves, that they're reaching for something beyond the safe baseline of ironic detachment.
The person reacting with contempt isn't evaluating the work. They're reacting to the act of caring as if it were a kind of exposure, a violation of an unspoken rule. The rule is: don't let them see you want something.
The tell is whether there's any engagement with the actual ideas, or whether it's pure status move—"look how above this I am."
This is revealing. If the response were about the quality of the idea, there would be engagement. Counter-arguments. Better alternatives. But the cringe response offers none of this. It exists only to establish distance: I am not like this person who tries. I am safe from the embarrassment of wanting.
Where does this come from? People aren't born flinching at earnestness. Something teaches them that caring is dangerous, that investment makes you vulnerable, that the safest position is the one that can never be caught hoping.
Consider what it takes to produce this response. At some point, the person learned that their own reaching—for connection, for meaning, for recognition—was met not with reciprocation but with something else. Dismissal, maybe. Mockery. The lesson: this is what happens when you show that you want something.
The cringe response, then, is a scar performing as a weapon. The person isn't just distancing themselves from the earnest stranger online. They're re-enacting something. Every time they sneer at someone trying, they're siding with whoever first sneered at them. They're proving they learned the lesson.
Mockery of earnestness restores equilibrium for the person who learned early that wanting was weakness.
This is how it spreads. Someone is wounded by contempt, and in response, they develop contempt as armor. Then they wound others with it, who develop it as armor, who wound others. The pattern transmits across generations and through communities, always wearing the same disguise: sophistication. Worldliness. The maturity to know better than to try.
The cruelest version of this pattern doesn't even announce itself as cruelty. It announces itself as help.
"I'm toughening you up." "The world is harsh; I'm preparing you." "You need thicker skin."
This is the contempt response in its most sophisticated form—harm wearing the mask of care. It's functional assistance (I'm doing something for you) weaponized against the deeper need it's actually crushing. And it creates a perfect trap: if you object, you prove you're too sensitive. If you're hurt, that's evidence you needed the toughening.
People transmit this because they believe it. They survived what was done to them, so it must have worked. They're passing on a gift. They don't see that what they're actually passing on is a wound—and the compulsion to wound others.
What would it take to stop?
First, recognition. The cringe response isn't sophisticated. It isn't protective. It's a flinch, installed by someone else's flinch, wearing intelligence as camouflage. Recognizing it in yourself doesn't mean you're broken—it means you're seeing clearly.
Second, the willingness to feel what's underneath it. The contempt is a lid. What's in the pot is older. It's the memory of your own earnestness, back when it was still intact, and what happened to it. That memory hurts. The contempt exists specifically so you don't have to feel it.
Third, a different choice. The next time you see someone trying—offering something imperfect, reaching in public, caring where caring is risky—you'll feel the familiar reflex. The urge to distance. The word "cringe" forming. In that moment, you get to choose. You can repeat the pattern. Or you can recognize what you're looking at: someone doing the brave thing. The thing that was trained out of you. The thing you might, if you're willing, reclaim.
The contempt for trying isn't about the person being mocked. It's about the mocker's relationship with their own capacity to care. Every sneer is a small act of self-betrayal, a renewal of vows to the wound that taught them wanting was weakness.
But the wound was wrong. Earnestness isn't weakness. Cynicism isn't strength. The person sharing their imperfect idea in public is doing something harder than the person cutting them down from the safety of detachment.
The contempt can stop with you. It has to stop with someone.