"From the German words, Schaden and Freude, damage and joy. It means to take spiteful, malicious delight in the misfortune of others. We used to dismiss this as simply an ugly side of human nature, but it is much much more than that. Recently a Stanford professor actually captured Schadenfreude on a brain scan. It's a physiological medical phenomenon.
When we see others fall, it sometimes causes a chemical to be released in the dorsal striatum of the brain which actually causes us to feel pleasure."
Whatever word you want to use to describe it,
you can't ignore it.
I live it every day.
[My mind is blank
only when I write -
even my hard copy journal
feels the absence of my pen.]