I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to overthink and overanalyze almost every social interaction. Like many college students, I’m prone to embarrassment — and a chronic people-pleaser.
Psychology Today categorizes embarrassment as a “self-conscious emotion,” which can have a “profoundly negative impact on a person’s thoughts or behaviors.” When embarrassed, we worry about how others will perceive us, which can spiral into feelings of awkwardness, exposure, and regret.
Embarrassment is an indicator of vulnerability, when our social mask cracks and we appear as we truly are: messy and human.
However, as actor Austin Butler said on SubwayTakes, “Embarrassment is an under-explored emotion, so go out there and make a fool of yourself.”
Research shows that people who are frank about their feelings of embarrassment tend to be more prosocial, or kinder and more generous. My own experience tells me that if I swallow my self-consciousness at a party, I usually feel freer, more relaxed, and have more fun.
So why are we so afraid to put ourselves out there? College students might be particularly prone to embarrassment for three reasons: a fear of surveillance, an epidemic of nonchalance, and shifting attitudes toward romantic relationships and sex.
Facing a fear of surveillance
Gen Z came of age in a world where any “bad behavior” can be recorded. Snapchat and Instagram stories chronicle liplocked couples at clubs and red solo cups at house parties. Many college students save their NSFW photographs for private “spam” social media accounts or close friends’ stories, but ironically, Forbes reports that 72% of Gen Zers do not trust AI-based digital security.
Modern surveillance culture – which involves digital location tracking, location-tagged social media posts, and CCTV technology – has normalized recording and posting strangers in public, raising questions of privacy and consent. On a personal level, several of my friends’ parents track and monitor their adult children’s location.
For our parents, only cameras and word of mouth could reveal their secrets. For our generation, the threats and consequences of surveillance lurk in the background of every social exchange.
Instead of wincing at an interaction and moving on, we face the reality that our embarrassing or vulnerable moments can always be recorded and permanently archived. We live in performance mode. We have grown up acutely aware of perception, which has led to a preoccupation with appearances and how we present ourselves.
Contending with a new landscape of sexual and romantic interactions
Gen Z is characterized as chronically online, socially avoidant, and romantically and sexually incompetent. Every week, I see a headline from a middle-aged journalist bemoaning the fact that young people aren’t having sex anymore: “a nation of virgins,” one new book cries. Another article proclaims the arrival of a “sex recession.”
More than fear of embarrassment or reluctance to be vulnerable defines our generation’s relationship with sex and love.
Sure, Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations at the same age. But we should consider the sociopolitical context of our sexual interactions (or lack thereof): the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
#MeToo created a global movement against sexual harassment and emphasized the need for explicit consent and boundaries. At the height of #MeToo, conversations about female safety and male accountability rightly dominated discourse about sex.
However, Gen Z grew up in a world with new fears, rules, and pressures surrounding their sex lives. The awkwardness of romantic and sexual encounters carried extra weight. Misinterpreted signals or blurred boundaries could be either clumsiness or harassment.
In a post-Roe v. Wade America, young adults have new fears about bodily autonomy and pregnancy. In The Guardian, Carter Sherman reports that 13% of Gen Z and 11% of millennials said the court decision has “led them to have less sex.”
“Making young people afraid of sex, afraid of having the wrong kind of sex, afraid of even being perceived to be interested in one another – all of that robs them of their ability to pursue pleasure, self-knowledge and connection,” Sherman writes. “It places relationships of every kind under a microscope and turns them into a potential avenue for persecution. It undermines their right to their own bodies, at a time when individuals are just discovering what their bodies can do.”
Current college students are also two decades removed from the arrival of “hookup culture” — or, the millennial penchant for casual and careless sex. FSU in particular is a party school — where club rendezvous, frat houses, and dating apps reign supreme.
Is hookup culture the central obstacle in students’ pursuit of connection and intimacy? I wonder what the “sex recession” looks like on our campus, and how #MeToo, Roe v. Wade, and our own fears shape our intimate interactions. Even under the shadow of profound societal and political change, intimacy is still scary for the vulnerability it requires.
Uncool for caring: The nonchalance epidemic
Every college student has heard of the “nonchalance epidemic.” The coolest among us are effortlessly put together and unbothered — with curated outfits and social media feeds. The nonchalant are above it all with unbruised hearts and no record of rejection. They trade sincerity for “aura.”
The nonchalant ethos comes from a fear of vulnerability. Nonchalance shields us from accusations of neediness and being “too much.” After all, caring comes with risks, like potential disappointment, rejection, or embarrassment.
I struggle with worries of texting back “too quickly,” or appearing overeager and friendless if I approach someone at a coffee shop. I don’t want to appear frazzled and earnest — with my coffee-stained sneakers, easily flushed cheeks, and self-consciousness.
The irony of nonchalance is that the people who appear careless actually care a lot. Most of us crave the deeper human connection that lies on the other side of embarrassment.
Rediscovering the art of embarrassment
The other day, I went to the Strozier Library Starbucks to grab a cappuccino while I was studying, sporting dark eye bags and a hoodie. While I waited, I had no phone to occupy my thumbs, and I accidentally made eye contact with an older man who mistook my order for his.
He was wearing a T-shirt with Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” on it. He asked me where I was from — England — and how long I’d been in the States. We talked about the Beatles. He said he should have worn one of his four Beatles-themed shirts instead.
I left the interaction smiling to myself, feeling suddenly less alone. I looked up and found a moment that brightened my day.
It is terrifyingly easy to drift through the day without connecting with anyone. Sometimes I walk through Landis Green with headphones and deliberately avert eye contact with several people I know. I make a beeline for my car after class, instead of chatting to my classmates, going to office hours, or sitting outside. I listen to music, or call or stalk my closest friends. To linger in awkwardness, with nowhere to go and no one in particular to talk to, is often unbearable.
The times I connect most with my classmates and professors are when we rearrange the desks of our classroom into a circle before class and back into rows after class. I am reminded that connecting with people requires a little time and effort, or a moment of friction.
Taking an extra second to rearrange the desks of a classroom helped break the ice with people I otherwise would have breezed past — strangers from the semester’s beginning to end.
We strive for our lives to be as smooth and glossy as possible. But sometimes, we need to roughen up the landscapes of our lives in small ways. We must seek out messy, imperfect moments in spite of ourselves, and allow ourselves to say the wrong thing and stumble. Be cringe, be weird, be awkward.
In her poem “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver asks her reader, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary, I’m going to try and make a fool of myself. I think you should too.
Amelie Galbraith is a Staff Writer for the FSView & Florida Flambeau, the student-run, independent online news service for the FSU community. Email our staff at contact@fsview.com.
This article originally appeared on FSU News: College students should be fools: The art of embarrassment
Reporting by Amelie Galbraith, Staff Writer, FSView / FSU News
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