hat my brother enjoys is a mystery to me; what he dislikes, he won’t let me forget.

He doesn’t like school. He doesn’t like work. He doesn’t like decisions and he doesn’t like other people making decisions for him. He doesn’t like small talk, which means most talk. He doesn’t like anything disingenuous, which is most things. He doesn’t like the toothpaste I buy for us (too minty), and he doesn’t like to buy it himself (my job). Not only does he feel these ways, but he is utterly, perpetually convinced that the way he feels is the sole correct feeling.

Thus it takes something close to fury for me to notice, but Cash really, really doesn’t like being embarrassed.

I called him a few nights ago to talk about a video I’d been seeing on Instagram. If you’re young and online, you’ve probably seen it. The actor Austin Butler sits on the New York City subway. He’s being interviewed. “Embarrassment is an underexplored emotion, go out and make a fool of yourself,” he says. “Things like that, to just go for it, to feel that feeling, the fear of cringe, and then go out and do it, because everything you want is on the other side of that.”

Although by now I’ve seen the video dozens of times, I stop and watch it two or three more whenever it appears on my screen. It appeals to the earnest idealist and the corny rebel in me. We really ought to be more vulnerable and authentic and, sure, embarrassing! We can’t let fear rule our lives! How are we supposed to get to know anyone if we’re scared of being judged?

Cash does not feel the same. “That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard in my life,” he says, though he says this in most of our conversations. “Let me go to school naked tomorrow and when the principal asks why I’m not wearing any clothes I’ll tell him that embarrassment is an underexplored emotion and that I’m a conquistador conquering my embarrassment… I hope you write your article about how I didn’t know about this stupid, stupid thing.”

Cash used to call himself “Muscle Man.” On late afternoons, driving down our hometown’s main street with its college students and neighbors and dogs, he’d get this delighted look in his eyes and roll down the window. Over my vehement protests, he would crouch in his seat, extend his arm, and shout to passersby:

“Muscle man, muscle man, autographs! Muscle man, muscle man. Don’t you want to see muscle man, ladies? Autographs, free autographs!”

I can still picture him there from across the backseat. He wasn’t yet 10, no muscle to speak of. His arm, curled in pantomime flex, looked like one of those inflatable tube men you see outside car dealerships. His thick hair, long and unbrushed, braided in tangles in the buffeting wind. His d lips stretched into a broad, baby-toothed smile that seemed to charm the people he called to, while I scrunched down in my seat, mortified.

I’m not sure when I learned the names for that bunched up feeling – cringe, second-hand embarrassment, vicarious embarrassment. I think we tend to recognize it before we know what to call it, especially in movies. McLovin dancing at a house party in “Superbad.” Steve Carrell in “The Office,” “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin,” several “Anchorman” movies, and “Despicable Me.” Everybody in “White Chicks.”

“Cringe” and “secondhand embarrassment” are ubiquitous now. According to Google Books NGram Viewer, the usage of “cringe” in English novels increased tenfold between 1980 and 2022. Between 2014 and 2024, Google users searches including the word quadrupled. It was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2022, meaning “to recoil in distaste” when “something so embarrassing, awkward, as to cause one to cringe.” Thus we understand cringe as, essentially, a detached form of embarrassing oneself, what I’ll call firsthand embarrassment.

The scholars, too, have weighed in. Mincing no words, the authors of “That’s So Cringeworthy! Understanding What Cringe Is and Why We Want to Share It” define cringe as “a unique form of vicarious embarrassment experienced by an observer when an actor makes an awkward attempt to form a positive impression on others in a way that is not excusable from the observer’s perspective.” Another article, “THAT’S SO CRINGE: Exploring the Concept of Cringe or Vicarious Embarrassment and Social Pain,” says cringe is “an uncomfortable feeling that surges when in the presence of someone suffering socially.”

These suggest that cringe is really about empathy, incorporating both the positionality and self-awareness of the viewer. What makes something cringe is an order of magnitude — “so embarrassing,” “so bad.” When someone transgresses a social situation past the point to which we can empathize, we will invariably cringe. My “Muscle Man” brother once shattered an unspoken expectation — that one does not proffer one’s fleshy appendages to pedestrians — but, for reasons best known to himself, did not feel embarrassed. I, attuned to his misbehavior from across the backseat, cringed on his behalf.

What, then, of Austin Butler?

If you subscribe to my brother’s current perspective, all embarrassment is bad. “If you told me to stop feeling embarrassed, I’d say, ‘yeah, that’s a good point,’” he reflects. “But if you told me that I need to explore my embarrassment, then that doesn’t make any sense.’” Nobody, I am informed, likes being embarrassed, nor has anyone ever liked it, nor will anyone.

I’m not sure he’s wrong, but I think he misses the point. If you’re aware that you are undertaking an action that violates a social norm, you must confront embarrassment. That is uncomfortable, and most people dislike uncomfortable things. However, if you force yourself to become unaware of your transgression, believe in its validity, or simply stop caring, you can transcend firsthand embarrassment. You no longer feel embarrassed although what you’re doing may be, from some pseudo-objective perspective, embarrassing. You have arrived on the other side of Butler’s theory with everything you want: namely, a liberty of self-expression uninhibited by others.

What would it look like to apply the same idea to cringe? That is, if we can transcend firsthand embarrassment, is the same possible for secondhand embarrassment?

Although I’ve grown to appreciate the power of embarrassing myself, I’ve never enjoyed cringing, all the way back to Muscle Man. I’m not alone in this, I think. When I type “embarrassment” into Google, articles and videos tell of embarrassment’s power and utility. “Why Embarrassment is Actually Good for You”, “How to Use Embarrassment to Your Advantage”, etc. When I Google “secondhand embarrassment”, the results are pathologized and preventative. “How to Stop Secondhand Embarrassment.” “Secondhand Embarrassment: What It Is and How to Stop It.” “Dealing with EXTREME second-hand embarrassment?” And so on.

The reason for the difference, I think, is that cringing is contained. It is the observers’ performance of social proficiency toward an embarrassing action at the expense of genuine interaction with the action. When I watched Muscle Man pimp out his biceps, my reaction was to evaluate how far his action deviated from normality — instead of being humored, curious, or even disinterested. My evaluative mindset prevented me from engaging with him.

It’s not just Muscle Man, and it’s not just me. When we try to transcend firsthand embarrassment, we decide whether or not to care that we’re transgressing normality as we define it. This is difficult and uncomfortable, but we have the agency. When we liberate ourselves from normality, we liberate ourselves from embarrassment, and enjoy our generative, creative, uninhibited capacity.

When we try to move through secondhand embarrassment, we make the same decision, but on someone else’s behalf. We don’t, and usually can’t, know why anyone chooses to do any one thing at any given moment. God knows I don’t know why Cash invented Muscle Man. To disregard cringe is to trust someone blindly, to subordinate our conception of normality to someone else’s behavior. Maybe cringing is empathetic, in a reactive, acquiescent sense. Transcending cringe, though, is earnestly, creatively, profoundly so.

I’m not sure precisely when my brother went from a practitioner of embarrassment to a connoisseur of cringe, but I do remember the first time I saw it happen. It was a couple years after Muscle Man and we were watching “Napoleon Dynamite.” When Napoleon started dancing, my brother recoiled. He looked like I must have appeared in the backseat. Halfway through the dance, he fully left the room, unable to keep watching.

Since then, I’ve watched Cash embrace cringe with some melancholy nostalgia. As a kid, he once moved through life with a fearlessness unaware of fear’s existence, an authenticity that could not imagine its inverse. Austin Butler would have been proud. But he grew up, and the fearlessness that came naturally slowly stopped coming at all. I haven’t seen it in a while. In its place is a ruthless, narrow understanding of normality, to which everything he encounters must measure. What doesn’t is either “stupid” or “disgusting.”

Reminiscing about Muscle Man over the phone, I asked him if he was still happy about his relationship with embarrassment, and he answered honestly — no. He said he stops himself from doing things so he won’t embarrass himself. He knows he’s a hater, too.

I wondered if he was beginning to thaw a bit, if he would open himself to being embarrassed and give up his propensity for cringe. I want this for him — for everyone, but especially him. I asked him again, sincerely, if he would open up himself, or at least be more open-minded.

“Since you showed me that reel, you mean? Is that what you’re asking? Bud, do you want me to just give you a quote so you can finish this stupid article? Ahem. After I saw this Instagram reel that Wyatt Joshua Meyer sent me on October 4, 2026, I will henceforth do more embarrassing acts so I can explore this amazing emotion.”

I’m sorry I cringed at Muscle Man, Cash. But yes, please do. If it’s not too much to ask.

—Associate Magazine Editor Wyatt J. Meyer can be reached at [email protected]. His column “The Under-Explored Emotion” contemplates experiences of embarrassment in modern life