Whether it's the infamous Will Smith slap during the Oscars, which aged so fast you could smell the moldy cheese-like aroma from your TV, or someone blurting out something poetically stupid, the Poorly Aged Things page is the place to go.
With more than 1 million dedicated followers, it's been great at demonstrating just how seemingly harmless statements from the past can one day become backfiring 'missiles', feeding the always-hungry, always-ironic presence of the internet.
Many of you may already know this, but part of the reason why we, humans, occasionally take great pleasure from others' failures is due to a little thing called schadenfreude. Described as the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another's bad luck, this psychological phenomenon is actually a very common emotion. A billionaire lost $140 million in shares due to his tragicomical silly 140-character tweet? There it is, schadenfreude! And there isn't a week that goes by without us indulging in it.
It turns out, one of the factors that invite us to collectively glee at these sorts of misguided moral judgments lies in the fact that it's mostly digital. As Russel Spears, a professor of Social Psychology at Amsterdam University, explained to Bored Panda: "Because the anonymity is in line with the point that schadenfreude is a passive emotion often observed at a distance where the beneficiary is not a perpetrator, [the internet] helps."
Spears also added that schadenfreude, just like Kanye West's insane rambling or Game of Thrones‘ Ramsay's long-awaited defeat during the record-breaking finale, "is easiest experienced privately and at a distance."
Interestingly enough, according to research by Conscious Youth, 71% of young people between 11 and 25 are feeling more confident than ever when it comes to sharing opinions online. But here's the kicker: 1-in-3 aren't sure about the best way to get their message out there, with 30% of those surveyed worrying about their posts coming back to haunt them in the future. With livelihoods being more connected to our digital presence than ever before, it‘s only understandable. Although, a bit scary, as well.
Schadenfreude, the tricky emotion responsible for the enjoyment of others' misfortune - and of most of the cringey pictures you see on this list - sometimes also called “empathy’s shadow”, is very related to our social status, it turns out. Friedrich Nietzsche, the celebrated existentialist philosopher, for example, saw schadenfreude as a sort of “imaginary revenge” to quell “the pain of our inferiority."
So every time a little, gleeful devil inside of us celebrates a multibillionaire's misstep, we subconsciously do it to alleviate the discomfort of collective inferiority? Sort of.
"The point is," Spears said, "that direct competition with a rival is rarely viable or risk-free if you are a lower status or disadvantaged group (or have low esteem as an individual based on your social position, perhaps). So benefitting from a rival losing out to unfortunate outcomes, or perhaps the defeat by a third party, is a much safer and more viable way of deriving benefit/pleasure."
Besides a good dose of vitamin C and, perhaps, feeling better about yourself, are there actually any benefits we get from laughing at others' failures? Well, people derive some positive psychological benefit for themselves but whether this could be seen as positive in a broader sense - that's very much open to question, he argued. "On the whole, it is hard to see the effects as positive (similar to envy, in that respect)."
However, Professor Spears believes schadenfreude should make sense on an evolutionary level. And so does Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and author of the bestseller 'The Idiot Brain'. "Schadenfreude is the result of several deeply-ingrained processes that the human brain spent millions of years evolving," Burnett once wrote for BBC's 'Science Focus'. This, then, explains the appeal of social media and raising one's social status in every way possible - even at the cost of others.
"Because humans are so communicative, our social status is heavily dependent on how others see or perceive us," Burnett explained to Bored Panda via email, adding that having a very low social status, or even feeling like you do, is deeply stressful and can trigger mental health issues.
And thus: "Seeing someone experience misfortune in a public setting means their social status has dropped and ours has improved, relatively. Our brains really like when that happens." Of course, it does. Especially when it costs us nothing (except a slight worry that karma might bite back for it).