Schadenfreude is happiness at another’s misfortune, like the gleeful jokes when Martha Stewart got arrested or the critics who got such obvious pleasure out of trumpeting how bad Gigli was.
So what’s the opposite? Is there a word for “unhappiness at another’s success”? Example: when an obscure band that you’ve been a huge fan of for years suddenly gets big and every teenybopper in the city packs into their shows and it pisses you off. Sure, you’re glad that they’re getting recognition for how great they are, but at the same time you really liked things better when there were only like 10 people at their shows. (Yeah, this happened to me last night at the Andrew Bird concert.)
So what’s the word? Is there one? If not, I think we should invent one.
“Envy” is close, but it suggests that the envier wants the other person’s success for himself, which isn’t really the case here. I’m talking about resenting someone’s success because it interferes with your relationship with them.
The same thing might happen if your best friend became a famous Hollywood actor and you resented it, not because you wanted to be an actor yourself, but because you never got to see him anymore.
A lot of people/places think that the opposite of schadenfreude is mudita, a Buddhist word that means happiness at the success of others, but I think that those people/places need to brush up on the meaning of the word “opposite.”
Looks like you read the title but not the post. He doesn’t want “feeling bad about the misfortune of others”, he wants “feeling bad about the good fortune of others.”
Now as far as which is really the “opposite”, that’s a whole other question.
There’s an additional question: If schadenfreude is happiness at the misery of others, is the opposite resentment, or feeling mad/upset at the happiness or success of others, or is it the true opposite of happiness, that is feeling sad (which is different than anger or resentment) at the happiness or success of others?
In other words, could you really feel bad/sad (like you might when thinking of the sadness of world hunger) because someone is successful or happy? Perhaps if that person is Hitler?
By the way, what you are doing here I think muddles the issue, because it is really “jealousy,” but not because you want something they have but because something has been taken away from you.
If you search for “Glückschmerz”, you’ll get more hits, most referring to or quoting this article. The word would literally mean something like “luck pain”, but I sure can’t find any evidence of actual Germans using it.
Maybe we should just use “resentment”.
In German I would use “Missgunst”.
It is a bit similar to envy, but without the implication that you want anything for yourself. Somebody else experiences/has something positive and you have a problem with that.
Yes, we have a word for every negative thing on earth.
That is a (lamentably common) misuse of the term though. It’s supposed to refer to a situation where you can’t get something you want so you tell yourself that it wasn’t any good to begin with. See the fable.
While we are on the topic of recondite German expressions, I hope someone can tell me a term meaning a feeling of dread or presentiment of bad news. It has been also described as the feeling you get when a goose walks across your future grave.