Our Schadenfreude Culture

Schadenfreude. What a fantastic word. It’s German, from schaden (damage) and freude (joy). Pronounced “shahdenfroiduh.” Emphasis on the shah.

It means “pleasure taken from the pain of others.”

Aside being fun to say, there is nothing–nothing–good about this word. What it represents is, in a sense, pure evil. Schadenfreude is not innocent; it is not the practical joke that is funny until someone gets hurt. It is the malicious, vengeful joke that isn’t funny until someone gets hurt.

Look around. Schadenfreude infests our culture in so many insidiously subtle ways that we don’t even feel ourselves succumbing to it. Like a cancer, Schadenfreude works invisibly, poisoning its victims’ minds from the inside. Like an infectious disease of the mind, it spreads to others through projected thoughts and deeds. The pain Schadenfreude causes is unbearable, but because it exists internally and is transmitted intangibly, it is often misdiagnosed or missed altogether.

Schadenfreude is as awful and ugly as gangrenous rot.

It is why reality TV is such a hit.
It is why a certain Ms. Spears stays in the news.
It is why the news industry’s unofficial policy is “If it bleeds, it leads.”
It is why people rubberneck at car crashes.
It is why people feel obligated to use the courts to deliver retribution via lawsuits.
It is why the most perverse, disgusting videos fly around the web the fastest.
It is why movies in which the villain does not receive his comeuppance feel unfulfilling.
It is why 9/11 happened.
It is why victims of crimes are never satisfied with judges who do less than throw the book at the guilty party.
It is why we never feel like we have enough.
It is why you enjoy cutting in front of the car that had cut you off a minute ago.
It is why Punk’d was so popular.
It is why people gossip.

Schadenfreude fills our jails, empties our schools, erodes our trust, and breaks our spirit. What a shame that such a hateful concept has been given such a beautiful sounding word.

What a shame that there is no antonym.

Let’s invent one, shall we?

But first, we need to do a few other things:

We need to focus on learning something new for ourselves.
We need to put our all into our work.
We need to find things to love about our jobs, our friends, our family.
We need to know that if we are in a bad relationship, it cannot be the other persons’ fault, because we have chosen to remain in it… and that makes it our fault. 100% our fault.
We need to take full responsibility for fixing everything that is not perfect in our lives, even if we didn’t cause the problems.
We need to search for a goal until we find one.
We need to answer the question, What do I want?
We need to find opportunities to laugh, and damn if the the moment is not appropriate.
We need to convert our neighbors from strangers to friends; we need to stick our hand out first and say, “Hi, my name is…”
We need to look at the world through the innocent eyes of our childhood selves, long after we have been given cause to grow jaded.
We need to do these things proactively, purposefully, and meaningfully…

…every day.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.