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My understanding of Schadenfreude from my personal experience
My understanding of Schadenfreude is that it is extremely common in the people I have met throughout my life and in society generally. I see it all the time on television programmes such as Candid Camera, You've Been Framed and on YouTube with "fail videos" of, for example, people unable to get a boat down the ramp into the lake, or bad driving videos which are so common. Until the last few days I had never heard of Schadenfreude but when I think about it, I have experienced it throughout my life (I'm 66 in November 2021) as myself being the butt of the joke. One example was when working in an office I was responsible for calculating the amount of overnight allowances payable to someone. Another man, more senior to me, was responsible for checking my work. He would frequently take claims off my desk without telling me so that when the client came in to get paid, I couldn't find the claim, panicked, got embarrassed and this is what gave him pleasure. I didn't know it was linked to self-esteem. That's interesting. I don't experience pleasure when I see someone's misfortune, quite the opposite. I experience empathy with their situation. The same goes for my mother. But my brother experienced schadenfreude almost every day at my misfortune when we were living as a family. There doesn't appear to be an equivalent word in English which conveys the same meaning. But examples of behaviour which induces schadenfreude in a person, to my mind, would be pranks, practical jokes, and mickey taking. Frequently the perpetrator, prankster, player or schadenfreuder doesn't care of the consequences to their victim. Putting a china plate on top of a half open door so that the plate falls on someone's head as they walk through the door typically causing them a cut injury, or worse - the player doesn't care about the injury or that the victim has to go to hospital. So long as they get the pleasure out of it - that's what matters.