Everything is Cringe

Believe it or not - I used to be full of optimism. I grew up in Plymouth, UK (the original one) - and it’s a very slow town. There isn’t a huge amount going on down there - the counties of Devon and Cornwall are, in England, often the places people go to retire. The average salary is £39.8k ($51.5k USD) - which was much less in around 2010 when I was sitting in my mom’s garden debating what I wanted to do with my life at age 20. I had a pretty misspent youth, but I loved computers - and I loved videogames. I’d even worked at one of the only web design agencies in the southwest of England - as an apprentice - for a huge £2/hour (£80/week).

I wanted to make videogames - that was my end goal at the time. I liked playing them, I liked computers and had dabbled a little bit with programming and web design. Naturally, the most logical thing was to get a Computer Science degree - so I did. In my final year, I built a video game analytics platform for Epic Games’ latest videogame Paragon (this was before Fortnite). I’d reverse-engineered the game client, scraped all of the matches, and put them all on a website where you could see how you did and where you might need to improve. I started the /r/Paragon subreddit and ran the largest Discord server. Epic even flew me to North Caroliona (Epic HQ) and Berlin for Paragon events. 35-year-old me would have called this ‘cringe’.

In 2016 - my website caught the eye of Wikia (later rebranded as Fandom), as they were looking to expand outside of their core wiki platform - and a small while later I was acqui-hired. My career trajectory had taken off just after graduation, and a couple years later I had the opportunity to work in the US on an L1-B visa for a six-figure salary. Very cool!

The preamble is important to understand how I got here. I was a very positive person who had a lot of luck. I’ve always wanted to build new things. Since 2016 (9 years ago) I’ve probably built over 50 “new products” - at least to 90%. They always say that the last 10% takes 90% of the time, and that has definitely been true for me. When I hit that wall I would lose my interest, and eventually find something else to build. I would learn a ton, and I’ve done this so many times I can spin up an almost-complete full stack app in record time - but I would never finish.

I recently quit a job I wasn’t enjoying, and I’ve been trying to be a little bit more introspective about my actions - to try to regain some of my optimism. I think a lot about the projects I’ve started and stopped, and why I never put them out there. The biggest reason, I think, is that I don’t want to be cringe. I didn’t want to be the guy pushing my latest thing, trying to convince people it’s the next best thing. I’m fairly online, so I see this daily. Everyone is pushing something. On X, Instagram, TikTok - people crave attention - and people do a lot of really embarrassing things to get it. I see people dancing in public. I see people filming themselves at the gym. I see the crypto bros, the AI entrepreneurs, the course sellers, the digital nomads, the fitness influencers, the LinkedIn ’thought leaders’ - all pushing their agenda and products. Internally, I’ve labeled these people cringe, without much further thought. But really, they’re grinding. They’re trying to grow their reach in an environment that is public, chaotic, and open to criticism — by lurkers like me who label them cringe and move on.

In 9 years though, I haven’t launched anything - they have. I haven’t put anything out there, because I don’t want to be embarrassing. What if I launch something and nobody uses it? That would be cringe. What if I think something is really cool - and later it isn’t? That would be cringe. It’s like when I look at code I wrote a few years ago - it’s embarrassing - what was I thinking! But I haven’t launched anything in 9 years (outside of my day job), and I wish I had. To me, at least - that’s the most cringe thing I can think of. Not doing things because you fear you’re not good enough. Or that no one will care. Or that you’ll embarrass yourself. That’s a really sad thing.

I’m not a particularly gifted writer, but this is my first step. The second will be launching something - even if it’s not perfect. Because not doing anything? That’s worse than being a little cringe.