I don’t think people really enjoy watching other people suffer or their misfortune, contrary to what the world often feels like. 

I just think that people don’t like it when other people are succeeding in some way, especially when they are not.

Let me qualify this. 

Success and failure are generally states of mind. For many unfortunates success and happiness are the same thing. Success is a big house filled with shiny things; a new car every four years; lots of $$$; new clothes; European cabinets; big screen televisions; vacations every year; a walk-in closet with lots of nice clothes to fill it with…you get the idea.

When one or more of these things fail to exist life becomes virtually intolerable for those who have made happiness depend on them.

I know this. I have been there. I am there from time to time. 

When we see others “succeeding” in ways we wish we were we can develop a sad sense of “why them and why not me?” which almost always leads to bitterness.

We believe they are happy because we have equated happy with stuff and they have stuff and we don’t. We are stuffless and unhappy while they, well – they are stuffed and therefore happy.

We are simple that way.

Of course it is only true if we decide it is.

So back to the idea of suffering. There are some people who actually enjoy watching others suffer but they are generally monsters. I am not talking about them but so many of the rest of us who sometimes feel good at another’s misfortune.

It is not really that we enjoy their suffering so much as we appreciate the fact that they just got a little closer to where we perceive ourselves to be…knocked down a notch as it were.

When we find ourselves secretly enjoying the trials of others we might stop and ask ourselves where exactly is our idea of happiness entangled with our idea of success. The more we disentangle the two the more likely we will find genuine happiness in the wholesomeness of life and the success of others rather than commercial gluttony and loathsome self-pity.