Young people are insanely conservative nowadays. Not in the broad normative sense: gay people are mostly accepted, xenophobia is generally disdained, etc. etc. More equal attitudes all around, but less extreme social deviancies are paradoxically treated much more severely. Online embarrassments/SNAFUs are showered with such enormous volumes shame that one can only imagine that such individuals were the scum of the earth.
Millenials had it right: to be cringe is to be free*. What was so wrong with that?
- even as I write this I feel my internalized shame arising