Other people give us cause for secondhand embarrassment all the time. The beauty and horror of cringe is that there are so many ways for it to manifest, and we can’t always see them coming. If we’re lucky, most of the moments that we make cringeworthy happen in a place where only those who are involved in it will ever know that they happened. 

However, in this day and age that is a vanishingly rare phenomenon. Not only do once-private cringey situations get shared to the internet frequently, but there are individuals out there sharing humiliating things of their own accord. Sometimes, social media seems like nothing more than a repository for cringe. We can shy away from this fact, or we can grudgingly embrace that public embarrassment is a thing that isn’t going to end any time soon. At least it didn’t involve us this time, although we might not be safe forever.