On Schadenfreude

& feelings from the other side

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Marcel Duchamp

Schadenfreude: pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.

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Last year was a year of many.

Many mistakes, that is.

Many losses and many dips.

Many times I fell flat on my face, metaphorically, many-many times.

This perhaps explains why the ongoing nightmarish replay in my mind of the last year or so has been of me falling into a cream pie in front of everyone I know — friends, family, people who are supposed to love me — while everyone stands around and just points and laughs. The resoluteness of this moving image lingers on the replay, like a moving gif, as I fall into my own demise, again and again.

*

In the 2010s, when I was a baby writer, there was a lot of discussion over the word schadenfreude, namely what it was and how it was wielded. Waxing lyrical on some celebrity they loved to hate-watch, whose misfortunes eagerly brought them into a sadistic state of glee—this is how many began to share public discontent through the maelstrom of Twitter, writing half-witted opposing remarks, sometimes pithy yet mean-spirited zingers, and more rarely, the perfect critique or observation that would hit the mark completely.

This is how I believe cancel culture was also born, on Twitter & Tumblr, radioactively brewing for good and bad reasons. It was democratizing, anyone could suddenly be a critic — and there was something freeing for me in that. Being a queer Muslim brown body who was so rarely allowed into spaces of art and culture, and rarely seen as a bestower of knowledge, it was exciting to see that there were others in the chorus who also had something to say, or shared opinions that were aligned with my own.

I never participated in the schadenfreude, but I always observed. There was something strange to me about how people want and revel in other people’s misfortunes, especially of people they don’t even know. It has always irked me. It’s still shocking to see how as a modern culture we have pivoted from sharing valid, political and social discontent into a society that actively enjoys watching people suffer. I think back to the sadistic reverie we have exhibited across a millennia during public executions. I can still remember Lower Manhattan when news that Osama bin Laden was assassinated erupted mass partying, and “Death To Bin Laden” chants for hours around ground zero, upholding the chaos of American nationalism. “The smiles of Schadenfreude and joy are indistinguishable except in one crucial respect,” writes Tiffany Watt Smith for Lithub, “we smile more with the failures of our enemies than at our own success.”

I don’t really don’t care about celebrities enough to have a Chris Crocker “Leave Britney Alone” moment about anyone in particular, but as a person who makes public work, I’ve been thinking a lot about this for myself. What it means to be on the other side of people’s hate, judgment, and criticism even if they’ve never interacted with you, your work, or your being—and even weirder when they have but are still invested in misunderstanding you. In recent years I’ve come to understand that it’s always a choice to misunderstand someone. There’s something odd, too, about expressing yourself for thousands to see, and the discomfort and fear that comes with that… especially when you are expressing sadness, failure — and all those things I love to talk about. I started to feel so frustrated that I had chosen this path, to share myself so open-heartedly …yet the connections I continue to receive on this journey outweigh all the rest, even the fear of schadenfreude. The only thing is that it’s so hard to remember on a daily. It’s far easier, for me, to do what I’ve always done and… just turn on myself.

*

I know how to effectively shame myself. Shame was a tactic fostered and wielded quite elegantly by my mother. Manipulators, groomers, and abusers love using the covert tactic of shame because it’s something that propagates on its own. You merely need to seed it into the framework of a being, and it will eventually catch like wildfire if you initiate it at the right time. Fostering and triggering it so that it continues to self-inflict shame as a means of survival.

I’m untethering myself more and more from the embarrassment of being seen, of the act of making public work, which is a choice I made many years ago, I wanted to be seen. But I didn’t know how dehumanizing it could also be to be seen. When I would dream of being a writer who was read around the world, I would never have realized that it would come with a fear of being misunderstood and that that anxiety would rupture through my ecosystem, making me want to cower and hide from the discomfort of writing so personally and vulnerably. The act of exorcising demons, of healing on this kind of level, for everyone to watch and witness, is fucking insane. As I continue on this journey, I am riveted by my own strength.

When I started writing, like really officially writing, and believing I was a writer, I could never have fathomed that I’d be here, with readers all around the world, wanting to support me. I started writing as I had no other options. We couldn’t afford therapy and I was a kid with too many emotions, I needed to find an outlet for my thoughts, for my tragedies. I was an avid reader, and after reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith at eleven (it was my sister’s copy), I decided I wanted to write as well.

Fame — or being known — was never a part of the appeal (especially when there are so many talented unknown writers around the world alive right now…) but, maybe because of the internet, my work spread, and I naturally enjoyed that. I like sharing myself (well, to a certain degree), and within writing is where I first learned to speak for myself, with my own mind. And though, theoretically, it sounds wonderful to be read around the world, the more you share of yourself, the more it makes you prone to critique, and the more people are willing to misunderstand and discard you. I see this all the time, especially with women. To some, you’re always going to be just another commodity. In a dialogue I had with my friend Rollie Pemberton, aka the rapper Cadence Weapon, about both our books for Hazlitt (it’s a really good conversation, please read it), he told me about the rule of thirds. Third of the people who interact with your work will love you, the other third will hate you and the last third will be on the fence… unsure, or, maybe, waiting to see whether you’ll fail or not.

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“The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. The Danish talk of skadefryd, and the Dutch of leedvermaak,” writes Smith in Lit Hub, “More than 2,000 years ago, Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace).”

Smith writes humorously and eloquently, calling herself someone who enjoys other people’s mishaps and misery, yet as she states it, she also admits she wants to dissect schadenfreude and understand it. As a word in English, she writes that it first appeared in Richard Chenevix Trench’s On the Study of Words, and its use erupted naturally because it’s tied to what has mattered most to human societies “our instincts for fairness and hatred of hypocrisy; our love of seeing our rival suffer in the hope that we might win ourselves; our itch to measure ourselves against others and make sense of our choices when we fall short; how we bond with each other; what makes us laugh…” All these feel like mighty truths and are all very emblematic parts of our society. It’s a relatively universal desire to want to win over your rival, and many of us struggle with an obsession with comparing ourselves against others. These are things, in many ways, that make us human. And it’s true, Smith shares many examples of schadenfreude that are hilarious, necessary, and apt observations, like these two:

And one last one: “The physician Sir William Gull was a pioneer of the healthy living movement in Victorian England, a “water drinker” and a vegetarian (almost). He went about giving self-righteous talks about how his lifestyle would protect him from diseases. So when in 1887 it emerged that he had become seriously ill . . .”

I think there is a big place for humor in our revolution. It’s also highly entertaining to laugh at others… especially at the expense of the rich, the famous, Elon M***, billionaires and other money-grabbing pieces of shit people in power. I was raised on The Daily Show and my dad’s favorite series growing up “Yes, Minister” (then later, “Yes, Prime Minister) so political satire has always felt incredibly necessary—but these days, it feels hard to find people to turn to who do clear-minded political satire. Even our cultural orators and masterminds like Dave Chappelle have fallen prey to the perils of transphobia and homophobia… the climate of the world feels corrupted and scary. Who is good and who is bad has become muddied… because of capitalism. People just want to get rich, and they’ll do anything for the coin. Including spreading hate!

So instead we are distracted — obsessed with the idea of celebrity because that seems like a gateway to escape this hell hole — to have money — and so anyone who is deemed to have power (influencer, famous actress) is an easy target and candidate for the frustrations of the larger public. So many of us are understandably angry — so where do we direct all of this feeling? I keep wondering if our hatred is being directed in the right direction. “We might be worried not just about looking malicious, but that our Schadenfreude exposes our other flaws too—our pettiness, our envy, our feelings of inadequacy.”

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I often think about how nice it would be to have a life similar to the writer Elena Ferrante, who chooses (wisely) to be completely unknown. Still to this day, after a few film and TV adaptations (that she signs off on!) people still don’t know who she is. I think when you get to a certain point of success in your career, no matter how you’re experiencing it personally, outwardly maybe inevitably some schadenfreude is to be expected, and yet I still feel we are rapidly invested in hating the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

Akwaeke Emezi in their brilliant memoir Dear Senthurian writes that it takes a huge toll on you to be consumed on such a mass level. Even if it is your calling and precisely what you have come here to do—to trust what you (like why you and not someone else like why are you special???) have something to say in a world that does not want you to speak… and yet to speak, anyway. Regardless of how many people will tell you (as they have told me) that you’re not good enough to pursue what you want to achieve. So to actually commit, against all monetary odds and financial constraints, to believe in your art and make it is a difficult and lonely path, especially when you are a woman, a femme person. And yet the violent men that continue to take space to speak are protected by armies of fans and institutions that uphold them and their shitty ideologies. They are shielded from schadenfreude, while the rest of us turn on each other.

I was talking to Zeba yesterday and she said this: “We live in a punitive culture. People want to be so critical for the sake of being critical, but I get to choose who humiliates me, or not.” It was a powerful reminder for a myriad of reasons, but the most significant reason was that it’s always powerful to remember I, we, do have the power to choose who and what affects us.  

Towards the end of the piece, Smith shares that schadenfreude has been called the “absence of empathy,” the “opposite of empathy” and “empathy’s shadow,” suggesting that “empathy” and “schadenfreude” are fundamentally incompatible and cannot co-exist with each other. “The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has pointed out that psychopaths are not only detached from other people’s suffering but might even enjoy it. It’s little wonder that even when Schadenfreude feels right, it also feels very wrong indeed.” But who I am to critique how someone receives pleasure, though I can remark on it — and I can challenge it. It’s something that concerns me, especially in the face of the importance of (r)evolution, I am here not mainly to complain, but to change myself and help others to evolve into better versions of who we can be. I have wisdom here that I think I’ve come here to share.

I’m trying to remember that I did not start to write because of wanting to be seen, but rather to be heard. That’s what putting out Who Is Wellness For? out into the world has reminded me, that what I wanted most was for people to hear me. I wanted a lifetime of screaming at the injustices of my life to satiate, and they have… but only once I started to accept that I was being heard, and people were listening, and that is enough because I am being brave by being me, by putting myself out there, and that is everything. It is a gift to create a language so resonant that I can share my woes, my pain, and my courage with you. And the reality is that this is why I write. To be less lonely, and to be strong amidst it all by facing it, facing myself and then you. I’m understanding, after many months of darkness, that all of it is worth it, because, at the end of the day, I still get to write… and people like you still get to read it. Nothing can ever really take the beauty away from that. Nothing can change how this experience feels like a small miracle. How my power to move through hardship and grief has brought me here, to this incredible place of profound resilience. Not at the expense of another, but just with my own spirit and determination to fight for my life and for what is right on this big, good Earth.