59 Cringe People With No Self-Awareness Who Made Others Want To Scream (New Pics)

Now look, when it comes to cringe, not all of it is created equal. We might cringe looking back at our Facebook statuses from the early noughties or remembering a hairstyle we thought was “edgy” at the time, only to realize it looked more like a train wreck. But these are hardly things to lose sleep over. Sometimes things just age like milk, sometimes we remember embarrassing moments as worse than they actually were, and sometimes we overestimate how much other people even noticed.

As psychologist Loren Soeiro, Ph.D., explains in Psychology Today, “Cringe is global, cringe is universal—but it’s also deeply personal.” Yet there’s a difference between looking back on our own embarrassing moments and witnessing someone else's in the wild (or on the internet). The latter can provoke a particularly visceral reaction, and it’s not quite the same as your ordinary case of secondhand embarrassment.

Secondhand embarrassment, or vicarious embarrassment, usually involves empathy: we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and imagine how mortifying their situation must feel. Cringe, on the other hand, can leave us wondering how the person in question doesn’t seem to realize how they’re coming across. “When you cringe,” Brianna Escoe and her colleagues explain, “you can’t imagine yourself doing what the other person did.” Rather than simply feeling for them, we might find ourselves thinking, How do they not know better?

Often it arrives in the form of an awkward flex, where someone has tried to create a positive impression of themselves in a, shall we say, questionable way. Think of someone trying a little too hard to look cool, coming across as completely tone-deaf, or displaying a level of confidence that their actions don’t quite justify. Their intentions might not have been bad, but often just how spectacularly they missed the mark is what makes it all the more painful to witness.

And these days, we seem to see a whole lot more of it. Now, it’s not just a crass bumper sticker that’s basically TMI on wheels or a company trying way too hard to be cool in an ad. It’s the humblebragging LinkedIn post, the dating profile with more “requirements” than an actual job listing, the cryptic IG story clearly aimed at one very particular person, or the AI-enhanced selfie that barely resembles the person who posted it.

From oversharing in the comments to spectacularly awkward attempts to impress, the internet has given us a front-row seat to all of it. Yet these people often seem blissfully unaware of how they’re coming across (or they’re just trolling—who knows).