MY THOUGHTS ON FAILURE

               

Failure is not the worst thing that could happen to a man. Your refusal to get up is worse than the misfortune of falling. 

All men fall and have fallen at some point in life. While some made their beds on the grounds they have stumbled, others made bricks from the earth upon which they had fallen and built mansions for themselves. 

It is difficult to convince a man who has lost hope to believe, it is nonetheless the best thing you can offer him. There is a natural tendency in man to want to preserve himself before anything else, and so we chose the path that is easiest to trod. And this applies to every one of us. Knowing that we are all susceptible to failure, condemning those who have failed will not be the wisest thing to do even if you have not experienced it. 

However, we cannot also celebrate those who have given up on trying just because we are fallible as everyone else. So, while it is good for others to extend hands of help when you are down in the gutters of life, the onus lie on you the most to lift yourself up and out. 

The idea that people must help you as if they owe you does not and will not help you in any way. It is your life we are talking about here. The decision to live or not is yours to make. More over you are the person living the life. If you succeed or fail at it, you will ultimately reap the benefits either way it turns. It was Soichiro Honda (the founder of Honda Automobiles) who said; if you believe you can or cannot, you are right. Think about it. 

Do not get me wrong, we all need a little help from time to time. I have always said; no one is self made. The richest man in the world was helped. Notwithstanding, do not go about demanding that people help you. It is the prerogative of the helper to offer help or not. So do not live your life expecting that any one is under some obligation to help you. As a matter of fact, living without such expectations is less burdensome. You suffer from less anxiety and tendency to hate or to be bitter. 

And if you are in a position to help, please do. We live in a time when people are fast losing faith in humanity. This is largely because of their experiences in the hands of other humans, especially people they have trusted at some point in life. My people would say; the reason a poor man builds his house close to the rich man' is so that the light from the rich man's compound can shine onto his. That is not the case today, because the rich man's fence is so high it blocks out the light. 

The increasing insecurity, heightened corruption, hatred, widening gap between social class etc can be traced to; man's inhumanity to man. It's appalling to even imagine that a man would consider himself better or higher than another simply on the basis of tribe, race or nation. These are not strange occurrences in our present world, we live with and experience it everyday. If we need to change the cataclysmic direction we are headed, we need to calibrate our hearts. 

We will need to learn to stretch out our hands and hearts, to ask and to give. Do not hate those who does not help and do not refuse to help if you can do so. 

I wish you a wonderful July. Have a great day and month. It's past  1am already, yet I can't get sleep. I am resuming morning duty today and I need to get some rest before heading to work in about five hours. 

The good Lord continue to watch over all of us. Remember, help those who need your help if you can.

SCHADENFREUDE: The Secret of Malicious Joy

 

Schadenfreude (/ˈʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/; is a German term which means; the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from getting to know about or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a complicated emotion where, instead of feeling sympathy, one takes satisfaction from looking at a persons' misfortune. This emotion is displayed more in kids than adults. However, adults also revel in schadenfreude, even though usually they disguise it. Schadenfreude is a compound of Schaden, "damage, harm", and Freude, "joy". The German word was first cited in English texts in 1852 and 1867. Researchers have observed that there are 3 driving forces behind schadenfreude: aggression, social justice, and rivalry.

Schadenfreude can be both intentional and unintentional, but it almost always involves some degree of malicious joy. People who are ‘schadenfreudic’ enjoy watching others suffer, regardless of whether they have actually caused the suffering. Schadenfreude is often seen as an evil emotion because it leads people to feel pleasure from another person’s sorrowful experience without necessarily feeling any remorse themselves. In fact, many people believe that schadenfreude has negative consequences on our relationships with other humans and even animals.

Schadenfreude often feels visceral, like a kick to the stomach. It may cause a sense of excitement or arousal, or it may evoke sadness or pity. It can make you feel glad or happy, but more often than not, it is pleasureful.

While most people generally associate schadenfreude with negative emotions, a few people actually enjoy feeling malicious joy. They may find pleasure in witnessing someone's suffering or humiliation, or in making them feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. They may feel guilty or enjoy the sense of power that comes with causing someone harm. While these people may be rare, they illustrate the full range of schadenfreude expression.

There are many reasons why people might feel Schadenfreude. Maybe the person being hurt is someone the person dislikes or has a rival relationship with. Maybe the person witnessing the suffering is happy because they are enjoying the misery of others. Whatever the reason, feeling Schadenfreude is often unpleasant.

Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.

It is hypothesized that this inverse relationship is mediated through the human psychological inclination to define and protect their self- and in-group- identity or self-conception.  Specifically, for someone with high self-esteem, seeing another person fail may still bring them a small (but effectively negligible) surge of confidence because the observer's high self-esteem significantly lowers the threat they believe the visibly-failing human poses to their status or identity. Since this confident individual perceives that, regardless of circumstances, the successes and failures of the other person will have little impact on their own status or well-being, they have very little emotional investment in how the other person fares, be it positive or negative.

Conversely, for someone with low self-esteem, someone who is more successful poses a threat to their sense of self, and seeing this person fall can be a source of comfort because they perceive a relative improvement in their internal or in-group standing.

There is no easy answer when it comes to avoiding Schadenfreude. However, the best way to avoid feeling Schadenfreude is to try to stay emotionally neutral. That means not taking sides, and not investing too much emotion into the situation. By keeping our emotions in check, we can better focus on what is happening and make rational decisions.

Laughter might be a good medicine for the soul, laughing at someone else’ misfortune is not.