Why We're Addicted to Cringe, Chaos, and Public Humiliation

Anatomically, as human beings, we have existed for around 300,000 years. But if we are talking civilization, it began around 5000 to 6000 years ago. Since then, we have all been trying to balance our most primal urges with our societal-expected ones. With the way the world has always been—about 10 steps away from falling apart; maybe one step away now—this juggling act has not been easy. From hunter-gatherers to grasping AI, the journey has been very long. But one emotion has been quite prevalent among us: the pleasure of watching other people fall apart. The Germans were the first to give this emotion a name. We will come to it in a while. Perhaps it is this vicarious instinct that explains why human history has so often been marked by conflict, competition, and conquest. People have always sought happiness and success for themselves, but there is an uncomfortable truth at the heart of human nature: triumph can feel even sweeter when it is measured against someone else's failure. The pleasure does not always come from another person's suffering itself, but from the reassurance that, in comparison, we are doing better, standing taller, or simply surviving more successfully than those around us.

Why cringe-fest shows are increasing on prime time TV

In our times though, wars may rage on, but most negative emotions—envy, anger, bitterness, malice and schadenfreude—are more in our minds. And storytellers in our times are paying attention to this particular emotion like never before. It’s getting viewerships and ratings like never before. Today's media landscape is being shaped by our fascination with watching deeply flawed, socially awkward, and often unlikeable people stumble through life. Whether it is called cringe-binging, hate-watching, or a guilty pleasure, this trend spans everything from scripted dramas and comedies to reality television in both Western and Indian entertainment.

​Schadenfreude in today’s world is more therapy. It’s more relatable. A global world off with the mask has possibly made us all become far more comfortable with the ugly version of us. Popular culture has played a role, as has the immense anxiety and disruption of our outer and inner world that has made us peel off the “good-natured” facade that we’ve put on for centuries.

From Desi Bling to The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives. From Schitt’s Creek to Succession. From Indian Matchmaking to Follow Kar Lo Yaar. We have been watching reality shows with cringe factor for a couple of decades. Read Big Boss. But now, it’s not just prime time television. The number of shows with the cringe-binge factor has gone up. From Hollywood to India, and everywhere in-between. Desi Bling is actually a remake of Dubai Bling, which did not have much success. But Desi Bling is having its own cringe-victory moment. We just can’t stop watching other people’s mess. We can’t get enough of public humiliation of other people. Is this just vicarious, or is there an element of catharsis in these shows. Picture this: a woman in a ballroom gown—diamond choker catching the light of a chandelier that probably costs more than our first car—is being filmed for her wedding. Not just filmed. Documented. Curated. Every gesture designed for an audience she can feel even when she cannot see them. She is, to use the technical vocabulary of our times, giving content. And somewhere in a one-bedroom flat in Patna, a woman in a cotton salwar is watching her on a phone screen propped against a steel tumbler, laughing so hard she wakes up her mother. This is the central miracle of our media moment. The most expensive parties are being watched by people who cannot afford to attend them. And those people are not watching in longing. They are watching in joy. In something sharper and more satisfying than joy. They are watching and thinking: look at these idiots. It’s catharsis.

The most expensive parties are being watched by people who cannot afford to attend them. And those people are not watching in longing. They are watching in joy. In something sharper and more satisfying than joy. They are watching and thinking: look at these idiots. It’s catharsis. (Desi Bling)

Now cut to Sima Aunty. Sima Taparia, matchmaker to the aspirational classes of two continents, sits across from a young man in Mumbai and explains, with the gravity of a Supreme Court judgement, that a girl from a good family cannot possibly be expected to marry someone whose horoscope is not in alignment. The young man nods. He is thirty-four. He has a master's degree from a decent American university. He nods anyway. And somewhere in London, a British-Indian woman watching Indian Matchmaking on Netflix audibly gasps because she recognises the nod. She has seen that nod at the dining table of her own parents. She has performed that nod herself. The horror is not that Sima Aunty exists. The horror is that she is so perfectly, recognisably real that it almost feels therapeutic.

Sima Taparia, matchmaker to the aspirational classes of two continents, sits across from a young man in Mumbai and explains, with the gravity of a Supreme Court judgement, that a girl from a good family cannot possibly be expected to marry someone whose horoscope is not in alignment. And somewhere in London, a British-Indian woman watching Indian Matchmaking on Netflix audibly gasps. She has seen that nod at the dining table of her own parents. She has performed that nod herself. The horror is not that Sima Aunty exists. The horror is that she is so perfectly, recognizably real that it almost feels therapeutic.

Now, cross over to a cold, grey town in Canada called Schitt's Creek. Moira Rose, once the centrepiece of a soap opera whose name no one remembers anymore, floats into the town store in a floor-length black avant-garde coat and a wig that belongs at a Met Gala. She is trying to buy milk. The shopkeeper stares. Moira addresses her as though she is a press reporter who has asked a stupid question. There is a pause that lasts approximately three hundred years. The scene ends. The audience exhales. And then they rewind it and watch it again. Scadenfreude? Catharsis? Therapy?

Moira Rose, once the centrepiece of a soap opera whose name no one remembers anymore, floats into the town store in a floor-length black avant-garde coat and a wig that belongs at a Met Gala. She is trying to buy milk. The shopkeeper stares. Moira addresses her as though she is a press reporter who has asked a stupid question.

Then there’s a luxury resort in Sicily, a woman who has read every book about indigenous trauma and sustainable tourism watches the hotel staff with the concerned gaze of someone who deeply cares, and then orders a fourth cocktail and forgets the name of the waiter who brings it. The White Lotus Season 4 is somewhere around the corner. So, there’ll be more. Not to worry. Somewhere in a Manhattan penthouse that requires a separate elevator and a four-digit code, the Roy family is having dinner. The meal is polite for exactly four minutes. Then Kendall says something passive-aggressive. Logan says something devastating. Siobhan looks at her husband the way a cat looks at a wet sock. Roman makes a joke that is almost funny and then immediately takes it too far. By the time dessert arrives, someone has wept and no one has apologised. This is Tuesday. Wednesday will be worse. Succession really was the epitome of cringe fest as far as fiction is concerned. And the audience’s growing need to watch the most unlikeable characters on screen being unlikeable—greedy, petty, jealous, vapid, drunk with power… sometimes, all at once. What is happening when we watch all of this? What exactly is the nature of that complicated, slightly guilty, deeply satisfying pleasure we feel when the woman in the ballroom gown trips on her own expensive veil, or when Sima Aunty's most demanding client remains, at the end of the season, as alone as she was at the beginning? Psychologists have a word for it. Actually, the Germans had the word first, which makes sense, because the Germans have a word for everything uncomfortable that the rest of us would rather not admit to feeling. Schadenfreude. The pleasure derived from another person's misfortune.

It is schadenfreude. But it's more.

The word sounds clinical. The emotion is ancient. What modern television has done, with extraordinary and sometimes almost surgical skill, is turn schadenfreude into a genre. Schadenfreude. Schaden, meaning “damage,” “harm,” or “injury”. And freude, meaning “joy” or “happiness”. But here is where the analysis gets interesting, because schadenfreude alone does not fully explain the compulsion. Pure schadenfreude would require us to dislike the people we are watching. And most audiences watching Succession do not entirely dislike the Roys. But they can’t have enough of them. They are fascinated by the Roys. They quote them. They write long essays arguing about which Roy child is the most tragic. Kendall stans and Shiv stans send each other hostile messages online. This is not the behaviour of people who simply enjoy watching others fail. This is the behaviour of people who are using these failures to think through something much larger than the show itself. What cringe-binge shows are really doing, under the cover of its extremely expensive wardrobe and cinematography so gorgeous it could make a dental clinic look like a cathedral, is something considerably more subversive. It is demonstrating, with ruthless consistency across seasons, that incomprehensible wealth does not produce happiness, purpose, or even particularly functional human beings. In Succession, the Roys are not cruel because they are rich. They are cruel because the very system that made them rich has made love a transaction, vulnerability a weakness, and loyalty a thing to be bought and immediately resold. While feelings such as second-hand embarrassment and schadenfreude—the satisfaction of seeing others fail—have always been part of human nature, their growing popularity reveals something larger about the times we live in. It reflects how people cope with social anxiety, navigate status and class differences, and process complex emotions in an increasingly stressful world. Far from being a sign of declining cultural tastes, our attraction to awkwardness, failure, and public drama may serve important psychological and social functions. It offers a safe outlet for frustration, helps us rehearse social situations from a distance, and provides a way to examine questions of privilege, class, and power through the lives and missteps of others. And we watch their dysfunction with pleasure not because we hate them but because we need them to be miserable. Their misery is load-bearing. If billionaires were secretly content and warm and capable of genuine connection, the implicit bargain that most of us have made with our ordinary, non-billionaire lives would feel significantly less secure. Yes, we all love it when other people fail. Especially if their financial and social status is higher than ours. This is the deeper psychology at work. Downward social comparison is not cruelty. It is calibration. It is the mind quietly noting: yes, they have the helicopter and the corner office and the absurd square footage, but look, look at what it costs them. The calculation feels fair. The ledger balances. The Indian context adds another layer of complexity that Western academic frameworks for schadenfreude are not fully equipped to handle. When Indian audiences watch Indian Matchmaking, they are not simply enjoying the discomfort of strangers. They are watching a dramatisation of forces that have actively shaped their own lives. Sima Taparia is not a cartoon villain manufactured for Western Netflix consumption, though she has certainly been edited to maximise that reading. She is a recognisable authority figure, the kind who speaks at family gatherings with absolute confidence, whose assessments of skin tone and family background and acceptable weight range are delivered without irony and received without challenge. The cringe that Indian viewers feel watching her is not the comfortable cringe of watching someone else's embarrassing aunt. It is the deeply personal cringe of watching your own society hold up a mirror; and we refuse to look away.

Turn on your TV, switch off your brain

Shows like Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives or Desi Bling operate on a different register but a related logic. The women at the centre of these productions are not meant to be aspirational figures in the traditional sense, though they project aspiration with a kind of industrial intensity. They are, rather, spectacles. Their jewellery is not just jewellery. Their holidays are not just holidays. Each purchase, each argument over a dinner table that could seat a cricket team, each casual mention of a designer who has a three-year waiting list, is a data point in a sprawling, unspoken argument about what money does to people, about what happens to the personality when it is marinated for long enough in luxury and insulation from consequence. The audience, many of whom are navigating the genuine anxieties of an economy that rewards very few people very well and everyone else in varying degrees of insufficiency, watches these women and feels a complex cocktail of emotions that cannot be reduced to either envy or contempt. It is something that contains both and transcends both.

Mike White's The White Lotus' great achievement across three seasons was to make the audience feel complicit in the cringe factor. The wealthy guests of the White Lotus are not easy to dismiss because they are not uniformly stupid or uniformly evil. Some of them are perceptive. Some of them are genuinely funny. Some of them articulate, with real clarity, the very contradictions that their lives embody. Like all of us in real life.

The White Lotus understood this tension perhaps more precisely than any other recent prestige television. Mike White's great achievement across three seasons was to make the audience feel complicit. The wealthy guests of the White Lotus are not easy to dismiss because they are not uniformly stupid or uniformly evil. Some of them are perceptive. Some of them are genuinely funny. Some of them articulate, with real clarity, the very contradictions that their lives embody. And then they go ahead and embody those contradictions anyway. The show denies the audience the comfort of a clean moral exit. Kind of like real life. Especially now. The masks have been off our real faces for a while now. Social media d