(2025-06-02) Crossing The Cringe Minefield With Cate Hall

Packy McCormick: Crossing the Cringe Minefield with Cate Hall.

Her 2024 essay, How to be More Agentic took the internet by storm and brought agency into the zeitgeist. (2024-03-06) Hall How To Be More Agentic

I was excited to see Cate drop a new essay that felt like it was written at me (and I think will feel like it was written at you, too) called Crossing the Cringe Minefield: (2025-05-07) Hall Crossing The Cringe Minefield

When we want to improve ourselves or our station in life, she argues, we start with the things that come naturally, the easy wins. They don't work. Then, we try things we don't love but don't hate. Those don't work, either.

Finally, we're faced with a choice: give up, or do the thing that feels deeply, incredibly uncomfortable, the thing that makes us cringe. That's where the answer normally is, because the cringe is a sign that we've left that area of ourselves under-developed.

“This means," Cate writes, "that existential cringe is actually a signal pointing you to where you can make the most progress quickly."

In her excellent book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, Nadia Asparouhova writes, “‘Cringe,’ a term that originated in tandem with the rise of social media, is a uniquely modern concept that refers to doing something that you misjudged as socially acceptable, which then evokes embarrassment from others.”

The cringe Cate writes about is an evolved version, an anticipatory cringe, almost drunkenly believing that a thing that won’t actually be cringe to others will be, preventing you from actually doing the thing. In either form, it’s a dangerous emotion.

we must kill the cringe. For ourselves, and for society.

Timestamps:

[3:37] Cate summarizes "Crossing the Cringe Minefield"

[5:48] Why this essay resonates universally (and why your 30s aren’t too late)

[7:20] My personal cringe around asking for help

[8:15] Why cringe exists - the "hot stove" analogy for psychological patterns

[10:53] How cringe distorts your sense of proportion in normal situations

[12:19] What percentage of people actually overcome their cringe (less than 1%)

[13:40] Whether naming your fear publicly makes it easier to face

[15:54] How to identify your cringe using the Enneagram system

[22:06] Why personal vulnerability in writing creates audience connection

[23:23] How Astera's mission connects to Cate's writing on agency

[25:57] Whether Cate kicked off the "agency trend" before it was cool

[27:38] Coaching session: applying agency principles to pp 7s

[32:49] The "gift of desperation" - how addiction led Cate to higher agency

[34:29] What it feels like to be high agency - seeing constraints as arbitrary

[35:39] The challenge of figuring out what you want once you can do anything

[37:05] Facing cringe is more agony than thrill initially

Final takeaway: [40:31] "The places where you feel existential cringe are where you can make the most progress as a person really quickly"