Schadenfreude.

Ever heard of it?

I hadn’t until fairly recently. But I was amazed by the concept, and now that I know about this German word, I can’t unsee it in our world at large.

It’s definition, via Oxford Languages: “Pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.” In German, schaden means “harm or pain” and freude means “joy.”

According to Wikipedia, it has been detected in children as young as 24 months old. Children that age are capable of empathy, and apparently they are capable of this opposite concept.

There are many deep psychological rabbit holes to go down regarding schadenfreude, but a line in a psyche.com article laid out the simplest application of it: “It is easier to justify schadenfreude when ill fortune befalls someone, who, one is convinced, deserve

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