Schadenfreude and me
I’ve just unearthed an interesting facet of my personality that, 'til now, I
did not know existed.
In German it’s called schadenfreude, or the feeling of pleasure
one gets upon learning of the misfortune of another. Leave it to the Germans to coin such a
word.
There were a couple issues this morning. The first was that
a major disc drive failed and the work everyone did yesterday, including mine, that
was saved to that network drive was lost.
The second issue involves the new phone system we’re supposed to
get here. The admins (they are called admins these days; not secretaries
) are getting trained on it today, and the cutover, complete with new phones on
all our desks, is supposed to go down Sunday.
I overheard something while the tech guy was setting up in the
conference room. Apparently there are
some connections wholly incompatible with us and our requirements. There
are a slew of features the sales folk promised on their children that would be
available within this marvelous new phone system. Guess what!
These features are not available for us.
There’s a likelihood that this particular project will have to be
scuttled.
So this one individual who is ultimately responsible for both of
these earth shaking catastrophes is storming around the facility, huffing and
puffing and exhibiting his slow burn in unmistakable body language none so
subtly advising all who might approach that they would be exacting more than
they bargained for should one even consider approaching him.
In both instances, the file corruption and the errant phone
system, I found myself smiling inwardly. In the first case, someone’s
going to get their ass handed to them for having such a crappy system that would
allow an entire organization to lose an entire day’s work. In the
second case someone’s going to get their ass handed to them for not vetting the
project sufficiently. The fact that I’m going to have to spend some time
remembering what I did and recreating some documentation is no biggie
really. Pain in the ass, perhaps, but it’s not that I’m jammed to the
nines anyway.
So here I am, cup of coffee in hand, smiling like the proverbial
Cheshire cat and wondering why I’m in such a great mood.
And then it struck me. My God. I’m deriving pleasure
from the knowledge of someone else’s stress. All patterns in the past say
that I should be empathetic and feel for the angst of the other person.
Of course, all reasonable courses of conduct dictate that what one should do in
cases such as this is shrug one’s shoulders and thank their lucky stars that
it’s not their problem. Sucks for them. But here I am finding
myself not only happy about, but reveling in some form of psychopathic or
sociopathic bubble bath. I’m positively chortling with glee in my
morning’s java.
Never felt this way before.
There is an English expression with a similar meaning. 'Roman holiday'
is a metaphor taken from the poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" by George Gordon, Lord Byron, where a gladiator
in Ancient Rome
expects to be "butcher'd to make a Roman holiday" while the audience
would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery
and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer mentioned Schadenfreude as
the most evil sin of human feeling, saying famously "To feel envy is
human, to savor schadenfreude is devilish." Susan Sontag's
book "Regarding the Pain of Others",
published in 2003, is a study of the issue of how the pain/misfortune of some
affects others, namely whether war photography and war paintings can be helpful
as anti-war tools or if they only serve some sense of schadenfreude in some
viewers. A 2009 study indicates that the
hormone oxytocin
may be involved in the feeling of schadenfreude. In that study, it was reported that when participants
in a game of chance were pitted against a player they considered arrogant,
inhaling oxytocin through the nose enhanced their feelings of schadenfreude
when their opponent lost as well as their feelings of envy when their opponent
won.
Do I need to objectify and examine this? Or should I just enjoy my coffee and my
morning?
posted by Marty Brounstein @ 10:02 AM
1 Comments:
Just sip your coffee. You've done your time. Isn't it great that it's someone else who is due to get their butt kicked? Just revel quietly ( you know "tee hee" rather than "guffaw")
Post a Comment
<< Home