I recently read Brene Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart” and find myself continuing to think about one of the 87 emotions she speaks of in the book: schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in another person’s suffering or misfortune.

I have been thinking about this a lot in the days since I read the book, in part because I see so much of it on social media. And while this begs the question of why I am spending so much time on social media, it also begs a larger question, and that is what is happening in society today that so many people seem to engage in schadenfreude. There are many reasons but one of them is that it is easy to hide behind the cloak of relative anonymity of social media and use the laughing emoji to engage in taking pleasure in others’ suffering. I see it when people use that emoji to react to stories about COVID-19 related deaths or waves of the virus sweeping through communities, leaving scores sick.

It may seem as though engaging in schadenfreude can bring about some kind of connection, but that connection is more likely is counterfeit and will be short-lived. True connection is forged by giving ourselves permission to be vulnerable and to let others really see and understand us, it is forged by practicing compassion and empathy. Collective schadenfreude promotes what Brown calls in her book counter-empathy and means that our emotional reaction is incongruent with another person’s emotional experience.

According to Brown, schadenfreude actually shuts down the area of our brains that we use for empathy and lights up areas of the brain that make us feel good and entice us to engage in similar behaviors in the future. But practicing schadenfreude, while enticing at first, can often lead to deeper feelings of shame and guilt because doing so can mean that we have violated our values and what we really hold important.

Is practicing schadenfreude something we really want to do? Is feeling pleasure at the expense of another person’s troubles really who we want to be as a society? What does this say about how we can change so that we can be a more compassionate people?

The opposite of schadenfreude is freudenfreude and that is the enjoyment of another person’s success. It is a subset of empathy. What would happen if instead of taking pleasure in another person’s pain, we celebrated another person’s victories? Celebrating another person’s victories and asking what that victory felt like can create real connection. We forge connection by building people up, not by tearing people down.