The Cure for Blue Monday: Schadenfreude and other guilty pleasures

This week kicks off with Blue Monday, supposedly the saddest day of the year. The high of the holidays is over (why is there only one eggnog season?) and many of us have already abandoned our New Year’s resolutions. Some poor souls are only half-way through their dry January. (I think there should be some research linking Blue Monday with the recent revised drinking limits which feel depressingly abstemious.) So on this grey and Blue Monday, I’m looking for some guilty pleasures to lift my spirits.

I’ll admit it. I like a guilty pleasure now and then. I watch Keeping up with the Kardashians even though science says it will actually make me dumber. I have my brother ship me Velveeta “cheese food” blocks from America (which are neither cheese nor, well, food really, if nutritional value is the measure.) But mostly, I like a bit of schadenfreude. In between my good vibes of paying it forward and random acts of kindness, I indulge in a bit of karmic naughtiness in the form of deriving pleasure from another’s misfortune.

Kanye West playing it cool but walking into a pole. Yep. Love it. The latest listicle on all the ways celebs can have a wardrobe malfunction. That’s good too. But true schadenfreude gold are the CEOs and execs who have their ego-driven, immoral, or unethical policies cause their eventual downfall. The end of 2015 saw three schadenfreude poster children in particular that gave me a bit of smug satisfaction.

Marissa Mayer

I’ve written before about my distaste for Mayer’s hypocritical policy of pulling the plug on flexible working, while building a crèche at the office for herself. I had predicted that her command and control management style as exhibited through her elimination of flexible working would come home to roost in the form of disengaged employees, high attrition and eventual poor organisational performance. Well, looks like she is mired in all three at the moment.

Countless studies have shown that autonomy is a key element in driving high performance. Mayer allowed her micromanaging and egotistical tendencies to overrule both tried and tested social science as well as the advice of her “trusted” execs. She has also been an abysmal role model for working mothers, taking little time off, yet bringing the perks she needs into the office, including sitting, heavily pregnant, behind velvet ropes at the Yahoo! annual holiday party this past year. Is that a standard part of the maternity package at Yahoo? Compare that to the announcement that Mark Zuckerberg is taking two of the four months paternity leave offered to all new fathers at Facebook. There is leading by example and she simply isn’t doing it. Time will tell if her series of missteps will mean her eventual departure from Yahoo, but it certainly hasn’t helped.

Martin Shkreli

In a fabulous animation for the RSA, Dan Pink describes the Shkreli phenomenon perfectly. “When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.” Nowhere has this been seen more acutely then in the rise and very ignominious fall of Martin Shkreli.

It’s hard to say whether his profit motive was ever moored in a sense of purpose and fair-play, but by all accounts he was a driven young man, starting his first hedge fund at the age of 23. Ten years later he would be known as the most reviled man in corporate America, which is saying something. After founding Turing Pharmaceuticals, he obtained the manufacturing license for the drug Daraprim, and went on to jack of the price of the drug, used as critical element in managing AIDS, by an eye-watering 5,556 percent. Whether it was this perfectly legal, but ethically dubious move, or his incessant twitter boasting that made us love to hate him so much, it’s hard to say. But his subsequent arrest for securities fraud, described by the FBI as a ”trifecta of lies, deceit and greed” gives me a bit of a warm feeling.

Will this rap stick? I certainly hope so, as we know that on occasion money does buy justice, but at least now we can be comforted that our initial assessment of “pharma bro” was not judgey or unfounded, but rather a spot on evaluation of his malignant character.

Executives at VW

I’m not naive. I know corporates can run a bit fast and loose with the rules. So when it was shown that BP and Halliburton most likely knew that their wells were unsafe, I wasn’t shocked. But VW has always held itself to a higher standard. Placing countless adverts singing their sustainability credentials, that ring horribly hollow now. So to find that they actively installed software to spoof emissions tests, all to the detriment of the planet and the benefit of their bottom line, seemed the height of hypocrisy.

For a while it looked like they would emerge largely unscathed from the revelation. A few mea culpas issued and some hefty fines paid, but basically a return to business as usual. So it was with no small amount of satisfaction that I saw their latest quarterly numbers. For the first time in more than a decade, VW’s numbers dropped 20%.

I can’t help but be reminded of the great morality play that is The Simpsons. In one episode, Bart gets an elephant, Stampy, who goes on to behave quite badly. Hilarity ensues. In the final scene, the zookeeper has this assessment of Stampy. “Some of them act badly because they’ve had a hard life or have been mistreated. But, like people, some of them are just jerks.” Some scientists say schadenfreude is our way of dealing with an underlying tension of economic inequality. I say it’s just fun to laugh at people who are jerks and get what they deserve.

But the truth is that I don’t jump with joy when every Icarus flies too close to the sun. I’m a little exhausted, actually, by the endless shenanigans of previously respected members of the community. And in this exhaustion I find my humanity. I appreciate that no person is truly evil and that every person, no matter how vile their action, is still shades of light and dark.

I just watched the Lance Armstrong biopic The Program, and found myself weeping for him. What a phenomenal philanthropist and brilliant athlete who inspired millions and raised millions more. What a liar. What a bully. What a colossal jerk.

So no, I don’t do backflips at every foible and failure of a vaunted figure. But on occasion, I do like having my gut proven right, particularly when the person on the receiving end of Justice’s balancing scales seems to beg for attention for precisely those aspects of their behaviour that lie at the heart of their ignominy. I allow myself my moment of smuggery, accept their humanity, and then I take a moment to thoroughly enjoy a good dose of righteous indignation.

Then I rightly remind myself that these folks too have hearts; families they want to make proud; people they are employing. I try to understand why they became unmoored, and I reflect and focus on healthier, more productive and more honourable things. Things like putting on my onesie, eating Ben and Jerry’s out of the tub and binge watching some reality TV. Certainly a victimless crime. And one that’s only got a bit of karmic kickback I’m sure.

(originally published in January 2016)

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