Jun 152008
Yesterday, I was walking home from a movie with a friend when we passed a middle-aged couple having a smoke on the sidewalk. The woman gives me a startled look and turns to her companion. “Man, count your fuckin’ blessings,” she said.
Mark Siegel: making perfect strangers feel better about their circumstances since 1973.
So are people, and it is not their noblest characteristic: they can in some secret way feel glad when “misfortune” doesn’t strike themselves but their neighbours instead.
I’ve read a book written by a Jewish man who had a little girl suffering from progeria. This man uses the curious, peculiar German word “Schadenfreude” to indicate the feelings of people who feel relieved when bad events happen to others, …as if this prevents them to happen to them, and protects them from harm!
Fortunately man also has some god-like, noble, heroic traits.