Deep cringe and the “Let… him… GO!” guy

TikTok's latest viral sensation is either a brilliant parody of mental health awareness, or the most intense life coach you could ever imagine

According to a 2024 report, 63% of TikTok users have never posted a video. There are probably multiple reasons for this. Time. A lack of a ring light or editing skills. The fact 81% of people see the app as a source of entertainment, rather than a place to express anything. But perhaps the biggest and simplest one is cringe.

Cringe is the innate embarrassment of putting yourself ‘out there’ on video, a social media equivalent of public speaking anxiety. But it’s also a certain, indefinable quality to posts themselves. It’s the Millennial pause. It’s what generates ‘thats mint ill post that’ comments. It’s the thing Gary Vee tries to tell people not to care about, which is fine if you’re as cringe as Gary Vee. In another lifetime, cringe was called things like ‘lame’, and it’s TikTok’s barrier of entry for millions.

@_andrewcurtiss @_andrewcurtiss ♬ You Found Me - Instrumental Pop Songs & Kris Farrow

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It can also be a posting strategy in itself. The first time I witnessed the approach of leaning into cringe was Andrew Curtis, who’d late be dubbed The Most Hated Man on TikTok. In 2023 he posted a video captioned ‘It’s totally ok to let your goofy side shrine through’ in which he pulled a series a wacky faces which to date has been watched 43.4 million times. Looking back now, it’s almost too obvious what Curtis was doing (‘BAM!!! Got your attention’ reads his bio) – and it worked. Today he has 3.2m followers. But at the time, the sheer nakedness of the cringe, and the temptation to think he really meant it, was irresistible; something like a weapons-grade helping of schadenfreude.

Since then, cringe-to-go-viral has been an established route for aspiring TikTokers of a certain, you have to argue demented, disposition. It’s the cynical calculation that views are worth more than personal dignity, unless – and this is where it gets complicated – you consider cringe a kind of performance art or work of high comedy. Which is how we get to Let Her Go Guy.

@emotions.in.lifeLet him go #fyp #strongwomen

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Let Him Go Guy’s videos all look and start in the exact same way. It’s a side profile of a man with a spiky fringe and leprechaun-like beard sitting in a car, who immediately turns to camera and launches into something halfway between a pep talk and a motivational speech. “Let him go… let him the fuck go…” begins his most popular video (3.2 millions views), which abruptly escalates into screams of “YES YOU CAN! YES YOU FUCKING CAN!”. The idea is that you, the viewer, are some sort of heartbroken friend in need of a corny, movie-style intervention so you can rediscover your self-worth and move forward with your life.

Just as no one at the time could be sure if Andrew Curtis was sincerely being ‘goofy’, the car crash-appeal of Let Him Go Guy is wondering whether this level of earnestness can actually be for real. There are no obvious signs it’s an act. The actual name of the account is ‘emotions.in.life’, and the man in the car, Tim Coles, runs a community you can sign up to for £5.39 a month with the tagline ‘Welcome to a place of understanding, you are seen don’t give up’. He has posted almost 1500 videos, all with the same insanely pitched delivery, all with titles like ‘Send him this’ and ‘Dont give up’ an ‘Shes not mad at you’. If it’s not an act, you have to wonder what having affirmations screamed in your face by the side of a road would actually do for you wellbeing.

Obviously, we all project what we want to see into these things. To me, Coles is a maximalist parody of ‘mental health guy’ – the still relatively nascent trope of the man who has learned the language of therapy and is now using it, clunkily, to ingratiate his way into modern life. As a culture, we’ve gone fairly rapidly from ‘it’s actually OK to talk about your feelings’ to everyone Googling ‘how to retrain as a life coach’, and Let Him Go Guy is like the rampant ID of the moment when awareness tipped into performance (there is, as with all comedy created since 2001, more than a touch of the David Brent about him). In any case, Coles has been successful enough to start receiving the highest compliment in TikTok land: parodies. Women with fake beards stuck on screaming “Let… Him… Go!” are cropping up in my FYP all the time.

Whether real or fake, emotions.in.life is a such a wrecking ball of cringe, it’s hard to imagine anything ever out-cringing it. Which rather throws down a gauntlet: if you secretly want to post to TikTok, what are you possibly still afraid of?

Good Anger, my book about the surprising upsides of anger, is out 5 June 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.