Cringe

You ever have those moments when you’re just going about your normal day when out of nowhere, a memory hits you and makes you feel ashamed? Not because of something you did that was criminal. No. Just something that was so cringey that it makes your skin tingle. That feeling.

I recently had that happen to me though that’s not really a surprising thing. I’m sure this happens to everyone. It’s this rejection of your past self and how naive or stupid you used to be. But here’s a question. Why do we do that? Is it to distance ourselves from the past so that we have this measure of having moved on further? Is that it? Is it just to convince ourselves we’re better now?

Our past is in our past because it made us in the person we are today. I think we often take for granted that maybe sometimes, it’s okay to have been cringey in the past. Sometimes it’s stupid and sometimes weird but overall, the circumstances at which you may have done something cringey was different then versus the observer you are now. You are not in the circumstances as you were in the past when you did the cringey thing so why are you judging your past self with the biased knowledge of the future?

If you dig a level deeper, why do we judge the past in general with the lens of the future? I think there’s a lot of observer bias here. Even when we understand the circumstances and reasoning of the past, we still judge it by our standards of today. I don’t think this bias is something we’re even able to completely get rid of. It’s just not something we’re built to do.

What I’m trying to say is, maybe just give yourself the benefit of the doubt for your past cringey mistakes. Even if you haven’t changed at all, the circumstances are now different and it’s impossible to really judge objectively. Memory is biased and easily changes with present feelings and biases. Cut yourself some slack.

Whenever I think of being cringey in the past, I now try to think a bit more in detail. Not only do I need more context for the blog but also because I think it allows me to give at least some credit to my past self. When I started doing this, I realized something. I was much happier when I was being cringey. How full of hope he was. How the horrors of society hadn’t nearly hurt him and made him into the cynic I find myself to be occassionally.

I miss that guy.