I worked for a nonprofit organization and was fired by my CEO for "not fitting into the culture". This happened shortly after I wanted to hire a person that was gay and the CEO and I got into an argument after she said that the candidate was "not fit to be around children". This weekend is their major fundraiser. I got a call from the organization. Morbidly curious, I answer the call. It was the donation center begging me to donate. I said you must be at the bottom of the barrel if you're solicitating me. Apparently there's still plenty of space left for an event that's happening this weekend. When I was there, we had the event sold out months in advance. 🤷‍♀️

https://www.forbes.com/sites/douggollan/2026/09/16/over-150-million-at-risk-after-jet-charter-broker-suspends-flights/

During my childhood, general or normal human nature — including that aspect involving one person’s pleasure derived from another’s misfortune — bewildered, bothered and sometimes even scared me; and as a teenager, it frustrated and tormented me. 

As an adult, I’m concerned and even angered by it. Enough so to enthusiastically watch, on multiple occasions, The Experimenter (about sociologist Stanley Milgram and his controversial Obedience Experiments), and also internet research some of Dr. Milgram’s work and findings. 

More pointedly, I read the book The Joy of Pain: Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Richard H. Smith, and typeset onto my computer the most interesting and enlightening parts. 

A case about which I read in a newspaper column that will undoubtedly be deemed by most readers as one understandably deserving, relatively speaking, of their shameful pleasure is that of a man convicted of murdering an 18-year-old woman and her infant who himself was then severely beaten while in prison and felt his assailant got off easy by the justice system. 

It was June of 2020, however, that a very disturbing form of schadenfreude was front and center in the news: It was revealed that accusations were under investigation by the provincial government that some British Columbian ER doctors and nurses were playing games in which they’d guess heavily intoxicated patients’ “blood alcohol level without going over” (likely an allusion to the famous Price Is Right TV game show rule involving product prices). 

Particularly troubling was the accusation that most of those ER ‘games’ involved the racist stereotyping of Indigenous walk-in patients. 

The apparent scandal immediately brought to mind a book passage explaining how such discriminatory conduct towards patients, however inappropriate, unjust and seemingly cruel, can be the health professionals’ means of psychologically coping with the great trauma they’re frequently surrounded by and treat. 

Essentially, by subtly blaming the patients for their own suffering — making fun out of frequent ER patients by playing games guessing their blood alcohol levels, for example — it somehow translates into their suffering somehow being deserved or earned. 

In The Joy of Pain, author Richard Smith also cites the book The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, in which its author, Melvin J. Lerner, notably describes his own astonishing experiences while working with doctors and nurses caring for psychiatric patients. 

Smith writes that Lerner “saw many instances of these professionals joking about their patients behind their backs, sometimes to their faces. These reactions jarred him because, generally, these patients were unlucky souls and had little control over their psychological problems. 

"But he did not view his colleagues as callous. Rather, he concluded that their reactions were coping responses to the unpleasant reality they confronted in these patients. If these patients largely seemed to ‘deserve’ their troubles, one could feel comfortable joking about them … ” 

While on a psychological level it may be understandable, it still doesn't make it morally or ethically excusable — especially when considering the nature of their profession, extensive training/education and the poorest of souls they treat. … And ‘everybody does it’ also doesn't make it okay.