I once worked for a guy who was a complete and utter asshole - thought he was better than everybody else because he had money, thought his shit didn’t stink, etc. Until the day I walked out of that workplace until some time thereafter, I wished painful death upon him.
As it turns out, the guy (who, with his father and brother, ran the business) was not only an asshole, he was a total crook. The list of customers, vendors, and employees they defrauded would easy run into the thousands of names. They also broke not a few laws, although as yet, no criminal charges have been forthcoming. The IRS is breathing down their necks, and the FBI is not far behind. My asshole former boss, along with his father and brother, will be in a prison cell at some point in their lives. It’s a matter of when, not if.
I honestly don’t know how to feel about this. Justice - whether of the legal variety, or the karmic variety - is in the eye of the beholder, and imprisoning people for white-collar crimes is, IMHO, little more than state-sanctioned vengeance. It doesn’t solve the problems they caused. What would solve the problems they caused is if all of their assets were auctioned off - including the assets they think they’ve hidden here and there - down to the clothes on their backs, and the money sent to the people they scammed.
If the rotten people aren’t thoroughly rotten—if they still have some element of decency and humanity to them—then bad things happening to them is regrettable. If they are rotten to the core, then whatever happens to them is irrelevant and meaningless.
I would take joy in bad things happening to bad people if those bad things led to their repentence and/or redemption. Even in fiction, I find it more enjoyable and satisfying when the bad guys in movies, novels, etc. undergo a believable, authentic reformation than when they meet a bad end.
If it’s natural, then why fight it? Sounds like something you hear in a religious sermon. Good people die, bad people die. I have no sympathy for a monster getting some comeuppance. Rotting and suffering in a prison for life for someone like Charlie Manson is just dandy with me; the man deserves nothing less. If it’s somebody that I merely don’t like, then I’m indifferent to it. When my BIL dies, it will be a relief for all concerned, including his children.
No, I wouldn’t. There are people I despised as a youth. I would have taken no joy upon learning as an adult that any of those people had a parent that committed suicide. A sense of dark irony perhaps but no joy.
When bad things happen to bad people as a result of their badness, I can feel a little mean glee. But not when they just happen because they happen to people.
Speed down my street, nearly run me over, then get busted by a cop? HAHAHA!
Speed down my street, nearly run me over, then get cancer and die? That sucks.
Drive drunk and wrap yourself around a telephone pole? Almost HAHAHA.
Drive drunk, survive, and get Alzheimer’s? That sucks.
Agreed. I was molested by a step-brother when I was a kid and, after much therapy to not have night terrors over it anymore, all I feel is pity for him. There was a reason he turned out the way he turned did, and although that doesn’t excuse his actions, it certainly helps to explain them somewhat.
As adults now, he’s been quite ill for some time. What a horrible waste his life has been and how awful for him that he’s completely missed out on everything to do with his children because of it. It’s all just so pathetic and I don’t mean that in a snarky way at all.
I realize I have a good example in my life of someone I really despise who made my life miserable in a lot of ways: my former mother-in-law.
She is/was a really nasty individual. I don’t actually know if she’s alive or dead because I broke off all contact after my first husband (her son) died. But if I heard tomorrow that she had died, I would feel sad that she had been so hateful that her eldest son barely tolerated her, and only for limited amounts of time. I would feel sad that when he died, there was no bond between us to give either of us comfort.
These are sad things, whether she brought them on herself or not. I can wish they were otherwise without loving her.
Interesting timing on this. Today, my evil ex-boss was fired. I got five IM’s in two minutes. Based on that, schadenfreude travels only slightly more slowly than light. (Yes, that’s hyperbole.)
Anyway, I kind of enjoy a spot of schadenfreude. I feel slightly gleeful.
However, I don’t let myself feel too gleeful for too long, because then I feel like a horrible person.
That said, this boss fired people who were doing a perfectly good job, let incompetent people stay, and would talk about employees to each other. She would target peopl So I let myself enjoy the schadenfreude a tiny bit longer than usual and helped set up the drinks tonight.
(OTOH, I do feel badly for her a bit; she’s in her 50s and it’s harder to get a job after a certain age. And it always sucks to lose your job.)
Oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard the stories of how my great-grandfather used to lock his family ***in ***the house when he’d go out.
I have a hard time taking joy in bad things happening to anyone. Sometimes, with a politician I find especially repugnant, there is this knee-jerk moment of “YESSSS!!!” when I first hear about it but I usually feel bad about it afterwards.
I don’t wish for bad things to happen to bad people, but I don’t feel really bad if something bad happens to them. Except for one person–I do wish for bad things to happen to her, but it’s more of a stress-reliever type of thing. I don’t think it’s emotionally healthy to wish bad things on people, so I really do it more for myself than for anyone else.
I would not object to something bad happening to them if it meant that I wouldn’t have to have them in my life any more. :o For example: if you work with someone who gets fired so you don’t have to deal with them any more, there’s a great sense of relief mixed in with all of the other feelings. For me, that sense of relief overwhelms any sadness I might have at something bad happening to another human being.
One of my least favorite people has been told that she will most likely have early onset Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure how I’ll feel if/when that happens. I would probably feel worse for her family than for her.
I have too many people in my life that I dislike right now. Usually I like almost everyone, so this is different for me, and I don’t like it. I don’t know if it’s just a stage in my life, or it’s because I’m older and crankier and less tolerant of other people’s B.S. Hopefully in the next year or so that will get sorted out and I’ll be back to normal. Maybe it’s good practice to learn how to deal with horrible people, but my patience is wearing thin and I’m getting tired of it.[URL=“http://boards.straightdope.com//www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
My maternal grandmother was a really nasty bitch to put it nicely. She had no redeeming qualities that I was ever aware of. She was in fairly decent health for someone in her early 70’s when she went in for hip replacement surgery. The surgery itself seemed to go fine but she developed severe complications the next day and died in just a few hours from heart failure. My mother called me the next morning from far away all broken up and all I could mutter was ‘I am sorry for your loss’. I was expected to attend to the funeral but refused to and I made it reasonably clear that the reason was that it wouldn’t be genuine because I was happy that she was finally dead. Family members have talked to me about it many times since then and let me know that the funeral is supposed to be for the living and not the dead but I have never backed down from my position that the world is a better place without her. I even told them that I wish she had died or been killed much sooner and I seriously doubt that I will ever backtrack on that. I realize that I caused some hurt among her children but they were the real victims and I felt the need to take a stand on that for some reason.
The other person was my college roommate my freshman and sophomore years of college. We started out fine especially the first year but things went downhill quickly the second year. He wasn’t an especially good or moral person in the least but he could be a decent guy on a good day. He was an only child and his parents doted on him like he was the second-coming because they didn’t know everything he was up to. He became Treasurer of his fraternity and ran a drug pushing ring as a fundraiser while simultaneously bankrupting the whole chapter with over $100,000 in debt in less than a school year (I never figured that one out). They got closed down by the national fraternity and had to sell their house to pay for some of it but my roommate’s parents were also on the hook for many thousands of dollars of it as well. We really didn’t like each other after two years of living together so we went our separate ways for the last two years of undergrad and only spoke briefly in passing but we still had mutual friends.
Of course he went to law school after undergrad and became a corporate attorney for huge oil companies like BP. He definitely had the personality for that line of work but I was always pissed in my late 20’s because I just knew this scammer was pulling in the big bucks just through an inherent sleaze factor alone while I was toiling away doing honest work.
However, I didn’t truly hate him and curiosity got the better of me a few years ago. I wondered why he wasn’t on any social media so I just Googled his full name. It immediately found an obituary with details. He suffered a terrible brain tumor in his early 30’s and had to end his life because of it. He left behind a wife and a young daughter. That one hit me unexpectedly hard and I still have nightmares about it. I wanted him to go through some misfortune but nothing like that but I am not the one that gets to decide the hand that fate deals.
There was this crazy volunteer (awful woman for many reasons, volunteered just to spend time somewhere besides her hoarded house) I got into an argument with once. She complained about the practice of euthanizing pets and insisted it was better for them to “die natural.” I blew up at her (lacking the tact I’ve developed toward education that I have today), and the conversation pretty much ended with me saying, “you have no empathy and will never understand until you’re on your own deathbed with cancer.” (pet in question had cancer)
Guess who died of cancer a few years ago? I never actually wished it on her, but I do hope she finally figured it out and regretted what she had done to her own pets.
I have never known anyone who achieved happiness by hating anyone else or by taking joy in other people’s pain. Quite the opposite: the more hateful a person is, the more unhappy he or she becomes. Instead I’d say we should turn to the words of Jesus: “Love your enemies, do good to those who harm you.”
After watching a friend slowly die of stage four breast cancer last summer I sort of walked away thinking that no one except maybe Hitler deserved what she went through. Nothing she had ever done in her life could have been so bad as to deserve how cancer tortured her. Her husband was a rotten man who broke her heart and cheated on her multiple times. And yet I watched him and listened to him at her wake for about twenty minutes as he comforted their kids with such love and kindness that I couldn’t bring myself to be angry at him. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age but I think inside of nearly everyone is enough good that almost no one deserves to die anywhere but in bed at 99 with a peaceful grin.
With the possible exception of anti-vaxxers planning chicken pox parties and comparing vaccines to Nazism – they can all go die of brain tumors at 22 damn it!