"Humans are social animals, and in order to get along as well as possible with our friends and neighbors, most of us are programmed — neurologically speaking — to feel bad if we do things that cause pain or embarrassment," Loren Soeiro, Ph.D., ABPP, who is a psychologist in private practice in New York City, said about the origins of cringe.
"For example, when someone feels guilty about taking advantage of another person, they are less likely to do so again; writ large, this tendency promotes an overall movement toward greater interpersonal kindness."
Many of us also regularly re-live our own embarrassing moments, but we shouldn't dwell on them too much.
Talking about why we "over-index" memories of cringey experiences, Soeiro said it's important to recognize that these memories might be exaggerated and faulty.
"In other words, we could be remembering embarrassing incidents as having been worse than they actually were," the psychologist explained.
The tendency to overestimate the salience of our mistakes to others is called the spotlight effect.
Research has shown that we consistently imagine others would remember the awkward things we said, did, or even wore than they actually do. Plus, we may be biased toward negativity for self-protective reasons. According to Soeiro, remembering our mistakes can be helpful if it gives us a leg up on avoiding future errors.
"For example, if you make a dumb joke in polite company and hear nothing but uncomfortable silence in response, you'll be a lot less likely to attempt the same kind of joke again," he explained.
But if you ruminate too much — if you really do find yourself anxious and unhappy about unpleasant events that happened years ago — please remember that the memory most likely lives on in your mind alone.
As you can see from the pictures, everyone embarrasses themselves from time to time, and chances are that the people you're worried about judging you are actually thinking about their own moments rather than yours.
At this point, the internet cringe culture has thoroughly established itself. As writer Kaitlyn Tiffany pointed out in The Atlantic, its early stages drew much of its content from YouTube, and the majority of the cringe came from the fact that the people posting there didn't seem to fully understand that anybody in the world could see them.
There were beloved cringe clips, like the one of the Star Wars Kid—alone in a nondescript space, wildly swinging around a golf-ball retriever as if it were a lightsaber—and there were repulsive clips, like the infamous My Video for Briona for Our 7 Month, in which a guy winks and licks his lips between making wild romantic declarations.
Now, the online world is full of subreddits, Instagram accounts, and X (formerly Twitter) threads dedicated exclusively to cringe.
However, no matter how much cringe is out there, some people—entire generations even—still can't get used to it.
For example, Gen Z daters are so "terrified of being cringe," that their fear has become one of the reasons why so many of them are single.
"You can get away with being ugly," Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old from Santa Fe, New Mexico, recently told Wired. "But being cringey is just, like — that’s a character that’s imprinted on you."
Hopefully, they will come around. Sincerely, a cringey Millennial.
