CRINGE CULTURE, COOL PRETENCE, AND THE ART OF KNOWING WHERE YOU’RE FROM

There is a certain kind of person or musician that will argue that their Cambridge English Literature degree can be an artistic superiority passport. They make me want to puke not out of envy, but exhaustion. Because the class divide they reinforce is quiet, smug, and constant. They treat footnotes like sacred verses, but it’s their lyrics that truly reveal the performance. Melancholy meticulously arranged across half-rhymed lines, stitched into chords like emotional embroidery. Nothing spontaneous, nothing raw just curated sadness with impeccable taste. 

Their verses aren’t confessions, they’re citations set to melody. And when they sing, it’s less a voice and more a reading list, delivered in a dialect composed entirely of borrowed sentiment and literary references. It’s less feeling, more footnoting. Swaying through borrowed Smiths riffs like they’re mourning a thesis. Irony’s their security blanket, wrapped tight while they sip Guinness and name-drop Derrida mid-verse. Original? Nah. 

You don’t connect with the song, you dissect it. It’s less about emotion and more about interpretation. I’ve witnessed this more times than I care to admit, performances dressed up as vulnerability, where the meaning feels buried beneath layers of borrowed references and curated sadness.

Nonchalance is a skill I’ve perfected, not loud, not attention-seeking. Truth is, I’m quite shy in real life. But quiet doesn’t mean absent. My mind is always switched on, scanning, interpreting, noticing the dynamics others ignore. I live in the margins and read between the lines quietly.

It starts in youth but seeps into middle age, this curated cool cloaked in literary affectation. A safety pin in the jacket doesn’t fasten anything, it gestures toward post-Thatcherite insurrection, carefully stylised rebellion that comes pre-washed. Their Instagram bios read like the inside flap of a Penguin Classic: “Spilling ink and existential angst. Lover of chiaroscuro and crumbling empire.” They crown themselves with enlightenment, as if their self-anointed wisdom relieves the rest of us from thinking our stories have weight without a Foucault citation to back it up. 

Not that they could unpack what that actually means, mention Discipline and Punish and you’ll get a blank stare followed by, “Never heard of it. Jonathan, pass me a rollie while I cross my legs and look quietly intellectual.”

I feel quite well placed to see both sides of this, I grew up on a council estate in Rotherham. My mum came from a large, working-class family. My dad, though, came from money. His parents ran successful businesses, one of them a travel agency that had me flying across continents until I was old enough to understand how different that made me feel from the kids around me.

But despite their wealth, my grandparents were staunch socialists. I was brought up helping people. They were advocates for the miners’ union. Friends with Arthur Scargill. I even met Fidel Castro, not as a footnote in someone else’s politics module, but through their fundraising efforts for Cuba. They believed in justice and dignity, not just in theory, but in practice.

Yes, they were wealthy. But their kindness was outward-facing, financially generous to so many causes and communities, though never indulgent with us. We were raised with discipline around money, taught to earn it, respect it, save it. Nothing was handed to us. No silver spoon, just quiet instructions on how to polish one if we ever came across it ourselves. 

I fought against it for years, resisted the thrift, the restraint, the lessons, but the older I get, the more I catch glimpses of my Nan in me. Her grit. Her frugality. Her unspoken pride in making do. And I realise now, it wasn’t austerity, it was strategy. Survival wrapped in care.

So, I saw both sides of the world growing up. But I still didn’t stroll past frescoed lecture halls, I carved my path through teenage pregnancy at the horror of my family, returned to college for years while the kids were in the crèche and studied dog-eared library books that I couldn’t afford to keep, I had my children’s mouths to feed. But I did it and thank god I did, because if not of found myself with entry level qualifications for university at 40 doing my dream of studying Education and Psychology. I didn’t quote theorists to earn a seat at any table, I was given a space by surviving systems some scholars only ever dissect.

Despite my grandparents’ wealth, I didn’t grow up in a family where love was freely given. There was discipline, structure, even generosity, just not much warmth. I wrote my thesis on poverty in education not because it sounded gritty, but because it is. The cultural and moral restraints I had to navigate aren’t abstract they live in the decisions I was forced to make, and more sharply, in the ones that were never even on offer.

By the time I was leaving school, I wasn’t seeking ambition, I was seeking attention. Craving what I hadn’t received at home, I was an only child and everyone was always working, always busy and struggling with what I now know as their own traumas. My relationship with my father didn’t gain legs till I was old enough to drink in a pub and I found myself knee-deep in a hole of male validation, 20 Regal and two litres of White Star. Not out of recklessness, but out of hunger for connection, for affirmation, for a space to feel seen. I squashed my grandparents dreams for the first one to go to university, by getting pregnant at 17 not because I was stupid but because I was in pain. 

Working class isn’t a badge to wear or a theme to explore it’s the ground so many of us are built on. It’s not a choice, it’s a condition shaped by fewer options and heavier costs. That’s why our art doesn’t ask for permission. We didn’t buy beauty, we assembled it from scraps. We didn’t dabble with danger, we clenched it like a lifeline. Most of us living through fight and flight most of our childhoods, riddled with generational trauma not wealth. And we didn’t craft identities around aesthetic grief. We created in spite of it, because of it, beyond it.

It’s this, the idea that you’re cool because you hang with certain types is the cringiest thing of all. No postcode, no institute, no bookshelf is more oppressive to imagination than lived experience can be especially when your rebellion comes stitched with privilege.

And for the record, I don’t think I’m better than anyone. Being working class doesn’t make me cooler, wiser, more authentic, it just makes me, me. I’m not romanticising it or wearing it like armour. I’m just a person, one of billions, getting through life with whatever tools I was handed or had to build myself.

This piece isn’t about placing my story above anyone else’s. It’s about saying: stop looking down as if yours is the only one that matters. Strip away the aesthetics, the degrees, the borrowed intellect, the pints and what’s left is human. Messy, searching, worthy. No gang, no scene, no title makes you more of a person than anyone else. Not all of us entered through glossed-over corridors lined with selectively-traumatised thinkers and that’s okay.

Superiority doesn’t belong to any one class or scene it’s the performance of superiority, regardless of where it comes from, that drains us all. Even some working-class spaces slip into gatekeeping, measuring authenticity by how much someone’s suffered, as if pain was also a passport.

This is part one of a few things I’ve been thinking about recently, I haven’t even started on part two, with the imagery of Farage’s militia waving St George’s pennants in trauma-inducing terms, or keeping ten pints of Stella on universal credit being promoted as patriotism with side of persecution on the side. That kind of self-mythologising loud, proud, and willfully misinformed isn’t grit neither. Romanticising hardship while excoriating others down as being above or below your station doesn’t get your inclusion in the heroes’ pantheon. It makes you yet another gatekeeper, wailing down the nuance.

But that’s not solidarity. That’s just another costume, stitched with a different thread but worn the same way. And no, I don’t hate anyone although it sounds like it. What I reject is pretence. The quiet hierarchies that pass for personality. The idea that creativity, depth, or worth has a postcode. This piece isn’t a division, it’s a dismantling. A refusal to keep mistaking curated identity for truth. Rich or poor, polished or raw, Oxford or overlooked, again we’re all messy, searching, and human. No one’s story is above another.

Real creativity? It’s rough. It’s loud. It’s dirty. It doesn’t need poetry books and deep gazes into the abyss, it doesn’t need the use of words in Latin or an atmosphere of grimness. It needs truth. It needs freedom. Most importantly as much as we learn we need to find our own voices for the next generation. We need individuals that don’t spend a lifetime of fibbing that they’re owed something they got at birth.

This isn’t critique aimed at inclusion. I don’t want in. I want out, far out. I’ve seen the circles, the scenes, the postured cool and I want no part of them. This is about naming what too many let pass unchecked, that quiet superiority, the way they look sideways at anyone who doesn’t mirror them. I’m not asking to be understood or accepted by those who conflate pedigree with depth. I’m saying I see through it. And I stand outside of it on purpose.

This entire thing is about one thing, that superiority. The kind that doesn’t derive from talent or strife, but from stance. From individuals who think their closeness to prestige renders them better than everyone else smarter, more cultured, more entitled. It doesn’t. You’re not better than anyone else because you can recite Baudelaire or match your trauma to academic theory. This isn’t jealousy, it’s fact, the inference that coolness equals value is the emptiest currency available. What you wear, what you name-drop, whom you nod to, it doesn’t make you rise above. Not when your entire persona is designed around exclusion.

So my advice? Be embarrassing, be free, be in the wrong, be fearless. Don’t confuse at-all-costs construction with real art. And don’t ever forget that survival driven creativity has an edge that no borrowed metaphor or social status can.