If Facebook is good for anything, it’s good for leitmotif.

Learning how to game the algorithm, plus a little bit of good luck, and your newsfeed can mostly be wholesome content like cool custom cars, and cute animal videos.

If your feed causes you more stress than joy, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, and there are solutions.

One of my favorite leitmotif FB grounds is the one called AV Installs and Nightmares where AV pros post pics of hideously poorly done installs.

It’s definitely a source of schadenfreude; finding joy in the misery of others. But as they say sometimes schadenfreude is the best freude.

Where I’m going with this is that someone made the comment that as much fun as it is to laugh at horrendous installations we’ve all done projects we’re not proud of, and should be careful of feeling smug at the expense of others.

I’ve thought about this before, and at length. For me at least, the projects that I am least proud of now centered around technologies that I hyped because I thought they were cool at the time, but quickly became obsolete.

Analog wall plates. Oh lord. So many, many analog wall plates. Remember when supplier catalogs were CHOCK FULL of terminated wall plates of every conceivable configuration.

Not that the move to digital was that much better. I still feel lowkey guilty for the 50 or 100 foot HDMI cables that I specified into projector installs and billed out at $1000+ only for HD over Network cables to arrive a couple of years later.

I read something a while ago that said “If you don’t cringe today at your younger self you’re probably pretty cringeworthy.” So take heart from that and think of where you were then, compared to where you are now. Hopefully we learn from our past mistakes and grow from it.