I didn't say it was nice! But everybody does it!

schadenfreude - Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

I've been thinking about schadenfreude a lot lately. It started with seeing the musical Avenue Q, which has a song about it. After that, it just kept popping up. In articles. In conversations with friends. I noticed it last night when watching The Colbert Report, even though it wasn't mentioned by name. I felt it hit home this morning when the wind blew my umbrella making it hard to handle and causing me to spill coffee all over my hand. A girl walking down the street laughed at me as coffee burned my hand.

As much as we may not want to admit it, I think all of us have experienced this from time to time, myself included. All day today I have been thinking about situations where I have derived pleasure from the misfortune of others, and in each of those cases it occurred when I heard something negative about someone I went to school with. Someone I didn't like. I also noticed that in each case it was often something that wasn't major, such as someone gaining weight and not being the beauty they were. Or it was something that I thought they deserved given their actions. Whenever I have heard about something horrible that happened to someone, even someone I didn't like, I didn't take pleasure in that. Illness, death, etc. Nope, I don't take pleasure in that.

Why do we do this? I'm probably it has something to do with some sort of psychological reaction to inflate our own sense of self-worth, kind of like the schoolyard bully who feels like a big shot because he or she picked on someone else, except in this case we aren't performing an action against this person. It's in our heads.