Picture this. It’s a Tuesday night, you have all of your homework finished and you’re looking for a way to wind down. What’s the first thing you’re doing? Are you putting on a TV show? Spending time with friends? Creating a new character for your Dungeons & Dragons campaign? Searching online for the latest Pokémon trading cards? Regardless of what comes to mind, I’d bet at least one person out there would consider the activity “weird” or “cringe”. However, I believe that no matter what your perfect Tuesday night looks like, no hobby deserves the title of being “cringe”.
To me, hobbies build identity and identity builds character. Many people begin to learn more about themselves and their abilities through their interests. Think about all of the skills people have acquired when playing sports. Leadership skills, developing their communication, collaborating, all of these are tested when it comes to those activities. Now expand that to Dungeons & Dragons where these skills are fostered over time. With card games, you learn how to strategize and scheme. Through cosplaying, you learn the art of costuming and craftsmanship. Even in video games, like Overwatch or Fortnite, you’re developing your situational awareness and quickening your response time. So with these interests, even if they aren’t as common, lots of people are still gaining useful skills that can be utilized later in life. A person can obtain these exact same skill sets, just in a different form. So I find it extremely unfair to label one hobby as “cringe” over another, given that both kinds of hobbies are benefiting people in a somewhat similar manner.
“Cringe” hobbies have also been seen making their way into more mainstream media. Shows like Stranger Things used Dungeons & Dragons as the premise for the series, demonstrating how these alleged “weird” hobbies can be enjoyed by all sorts of people. Many trends circulating on TikTok or Instagram, like doing “anime hands” in reference to cosplaying, are appearing in regular media despite being considered “cringe”. Granted, this could be due to outside people imitating the trends, but, hey, in my eyes, they’re still contributing to the increasing popularity of these hobbies!
Now, are there caveats to this argument? Possibly, I mean. I can think of some bizarre hobbies that would definitely cause my eyebrow to raise. To those who have a collection of homemade taxidermied rats? Yeah, I’m not going to lie, that has me scratching my head. But who am I to tell you to stop collecting them? There are interests out there that not everyone is going to like. But at the end of the day, everyone has free will and can choose to fill their time as they wish. Even if it’s not a hobby you would partake in, I still find no reason to yack on someone’s yum. And ultimately, if someone does decide to call your hobby “cringe”, honestly, who cares! You like what you like, and if it makes you happy (and it isn’t illegal), that’s all that matters!
If you’ve read my review of KPOP Demon Hunters, you’ll know I outed myself as a devoted K-Pop fan. Truthfully, this has been so ingrained into my life that I personally have no issues boasting about my love for it publicly. That said, there are others who are not as comfortable with sharing their interests because of stigmatized labels such as “cringe” or “weird” being slapped onto things that we genuinely enjoy. If certain hobbies aren’t your cup of tea, that’s perfectly fine. But that’s no reason to spit in someone else’s cup. It’s time we stop putting others down and learn to just let people live!