a lot of people were taught, from a young age, that sincerity will be punished. and, at the same time as they are taught that their sincere emotions must be hidden away, they are also taught that they must perform for other people; they must perform a moderately decent and polite persona with no strong emotions in either direction (but especially not negative emotions). they are taught to smooth over their rough spots: sincere expressions of negative emotions will make people think of you as needy, or moody, or bossy, or just a jerk. sincere expressions of positive emotions will make people think of you as ignorant, or annoying, or embarrassing, or obsessive. but, at heart, everyone wants to be able to express their sincere emotions, and everyone wants their sincere emotions to be accepted, or, at very least, tolerated.
i've found that if you can build a space where expressing sincere emotions isn't punished, but encouraged, you get people blooming and growing in ways they've never had the chance to. to express and be accepted sincerely is a human need that is unmet in a lot of people, maybe in most people, and I think it should be a goal of every community space to encourage sincerity, and to discourage the punishment of sincerity. even if the strong emotions that come with sincerity can be difficult to work through. i think it's worth it.
that's really what it means when people are saying "cringe is dead", i think. but where theory becomes practice is what you're encouraging (or discouraging) in your community space. i hope people understand that expressing some negative emotion is just as normal as expressing positive emotion, and that it's more important to explore where those emotions are coming from, than to try and punish the way those emotions are expressed. otherwise you get guys who bottle up everything until they explode, or people who perform so much that the person underneath the mask has completely atrophied away to nothing
