Schadenfreude

I remember hearing this word when I went to New York to visit one of my best friends a couple of years ago.  We went to go watch Avenue Q (wouldn’t advise it for younger audiences) the last day we were in town, so you can imagine it was a busy morning packing up, going to Broadway, then going to the airport right after.

Schadenfreude:  (German)  Pleasure that is derived from the misfortunes of others.

If you didn’t read my post on “FML” this post is a follow up to those thoughts.

I’ll be the first one to admit it, I will laugh if someone gets clobbered right in the nether regions.  In college we used to play this stupid game where one person would stand at the end of the hallway and another guy would grab a tennis ball and a driver and see if he could tag the other guy in the nuts with the ball. Talk about stupid.

There’s also this ping-pong game where if someone messes up and loses a point, they have to lift up their shirt and the other guy gets to slam a ping-pong ball at their bare chest.  If you aim right and connect several times, inevitably you can create a polka-dot pattern of welts on some poor little teenager.

But when it comes to “FML” there is just something that unnerves me about that general attitude.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but there’s something about treating the anecdotes that are on that site as entertainment.  I got a lot of responses to my reaction, and most of them can be summed up in one statement:

“What’s the big deal? It’s funny.”

There are some that are hilarious.  But my point was that these are stories from real people, and some of them have some things going on in their life that are truly “FML” worthy.  The large majority, however, are not.

Most of it, from what I saw, is grossly sexual in nature.  They need to put some sort of filter on it or something.  If I had a kid, I wouldn’t want them to read about such overt sexual misfortunes.  Many of the posts just scream”exhibitionist”, and reading them can be likened to voyeurism.  With that said, I think we need to do a better job of communicating the importance of relationships and learning to teach young people about our sexual nature as God created us to be.  We can’t just dismiss matters of sexuality and expect people to just figure it out on their own.

All in all, if some of the posts are humorous, just keep in mind that some people’s lives truly are “F’ed,” and instead of laughing it off–consuming pleasure at the cost of someone else’s pain–there’s more need for other things that start with a F, like forgiveness, helpful feedback, or just plain friendship extended towards those who need it the most.