Though it sounds Shakespearean, the idiom Misery loves company wasn’t coined by the Bard—the ultimate master of stories on power, revenge, and the messy depths of the human condition. The idiom is thought to have roots in Latin and classical literature.
The phrase “Misery loves company” is just a pithy way of saying that when someone is struggling, they find comfort in knowing they’re not alone in their hardship.
We know this anecdotally. You have a crappy day at work, you call a friend who then tells you how much more of a tool their coworker is, and miraculously, you feel your life isn’t so bad anymore.
At the root, misery loves company because it’s reassuring to know we’re not alone in our struggles and that we aren’t being singled out for punishment by an unfair universe conspiring against us.
But then we take it a step further. Misery doesn’t just love company—it prefers company that’s even more miserable. There’s a fancy term (appropriated from the Germans) to describe this behavior: Schadenfreude (sounds like shaa dun froy duh). Duh, indeed!
In the Dear Sugar column, on the website The Rumpus, author Cheryl Strayed once wrote,
We are all savages inside. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn’t a person reading this who hasn’t at one point or another had that “why not me?” voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.
Schadenfreude, the German word, describes the guilty pleasure we derive from watching others’ troubles, especially when we feel they had it coming. It’s that little spark of joy you get when the jerk who sped past you on the freeway gets pulled over by a cop a few miles down the road. It’s why we devour celebrity gossip—because if our lives aren’t perfect, why should theirs be?
Bette Midler once said,
The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.
Schadenfreude is a deeply human, although embarrassing, emotion. It’s that strange mix of warm and cold, pleasure and guilt, justice and pettiness. Psychologists suggest it comes from three main sources:
- Self-evaluation – When someone else stumbles, we feel a little better about our own standing.
- Social identity – If the other team loses, our team wins, even if we had nothing to do with it.
- Justice – When karma does its thing, we feel like the universe is playing fair.
But here’s the catch: indulging in schadenfreude too often can make us colder, more cynical, and less compassionate. Over time, it erodes empathy, causing us to focus on tearing others down instead of building ourselves up.
Buddhist philosophy offers a different (and much healthier) way to feel good—one that’s the total opposite of schadenfreude and, thankfully, less of a tongue twister. It’s called mudita, and it’s one of the four Brahmavihārās.
Mudita refers to sympathetic or vicarious joy—essentially, the opposite of schadenfreude. It’s the pure, selfless happiness we feel when someone else succeeds or experiences good fortune, without jealousy or comparison.
Instead of thinking, 'Why them and not me? ' we shift to 'Good for them! ' How wonderful! Mudita is a powerful antidote to bitterness—and way more fulfilling than schadenfreude.
It only takes one simple realization for the switch to turn from schadenfreude to Mudita. It’s the realization that life is not a zero-sum game—our winning does not depend on someone losing and vice versa.
Embracing mudita means feeling more joy from your team’s victory than from the opposing team’s defeat. It’s about celebrating someone else’s success rather than savoring their downfall. One leaves us bitter, the other leaves us better.
You hear so many great stories. Somebody is building a 108-foot-tall Guru Rinpoche statue, while someone else is building a great stupa or a big monastery, or a lama is supporting and honoring many monks. If you can rejoice in these great deeds, you can actually earn all of that merit, too. It really doesn’t have to be happening here on ‘my property’; it doesn’t have to be ‘my doing,’ ‘my this,’ or ‘my that.’ That’s a very limited perspective. If you’re starting something, that’s wonderful. But if you aren’t starting something, that doesn’t mean you can’t rejoice and have a tremendous sense of appreciation of the fact that somebody else is doing it.
Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Uncommon Happiness—The Path of the Compassionate Warrior