The Joy in Other’s Misfortune

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explain how the influence of media has given the audience a new form of entertainment that thrives on the pain, drama, and lack of comfortability of others. While interacting online with others can be a thrilling and lighthearted experience, it’s as if there’s also another side to being online. By this other side, I’m referring to the lack of moral responsibility that allows users to dehumanize others, themselves to be dehumanized for attention, and even place themselves in the chairs of critics. The need for attention from online users has led to a sort of masochistic belief system where it’s okay to be mistreated so long as benefits arise from it. While it is possible to see this desire for fame and fortune face-to-face, the occurrence is grander online due to the immediate access to millions of people all over the world. It’s also easier to lose a moral conscience because the consequences are less worrisome due to online anonymity than if individuals had acted in person where their identity is known. There’s a difficulty in understanding how and who all are morally responsible because of the various factors involved, however, it is clear that multiple individuals are indeed at fault.

Introduction

Social media has become a grand part of society’s everyday lives. It’s being used to connect with loved ones, discover new talent, share our stories, help those we find in need, etc. The options truly are endless; however, does this mean that the options are always possible of being pure-hearted, innocent banter, or is there something else going on online that has shifted into a reality of its own rather than connecting us to the one we live in? When I say another reality, I’m referring to the issue that the line between what’s morally acceptable to share and enjoy is becoming blurry. I believe that the creation of social media has become a gateway into letting people live out their dark fantasies and joys because the accountability that comes along with in-person interactions isn’t an imminent threat to their lifestyle.

Throughout the years, society has transitioned from viewing TV shows like Jackass and Love & Hip-Hop to online influencers like Bhad Bhabie, BoonkGang, and most importantly to this paper Lovely Peaches. Lovely Peaches was a teenager, now in her early twenties, who gained fame on Instagram faking fights with herself, posting herself eating feces out of the toilet, and placing menstrual blood on her face among other things. Several background stories theorize why Peaches is the way that she is—one being that she’s experienced trauma from being abused and forced into sex work. Now, there is no question as to whether these acts committed by internet stars, like those mentioned above, are morally wrong; however, we have to ask ourselves who else is at fault here? Could it be the viewers that laugh and encourage them to do more, the social media platforms that allow them to maintain a following and account, or could it even be the system that has left them broken with no other option but to use heinous acts as an outlet from their world?

I intend to further explain how the influence of media has given the audience a new form of entertainment that thrives on the pain, drama, and lack of comfortability of others. The rise of social media allows for tolerance of actions that could be viewed as criminal face-to-face. I will better explain why these acts are becoming more acceptable using the story of Peaches, studies of emotions, experiences within the online world, as well as the effects of canceling someone.

Introduction of Peaches’ rise to fame

Lovely Peaches, originally known as Brittany Johnson, was popularized on Instagram back in 2017 where she made posts of being held captive by a man. She would continue to make posts and delete them without any clarification. After a few days without posting, she returned to say that she was playing and that she had been with her pimp, who she loves. Users who had been invested in her safety were now confused, yet they were also curious to see what would follow. Peaches began posting videos of her with strange men whom she claimed were clients that her pimp had brought over. This was a recurring event with her as she gained more followers each month. I’d discovered her through two friends who followed her for entertainment. While I was confused as to why they followed her, I realized that it was because of how much she’d embarrassed herself—which they found funny, even though it was extremely uncomfortable to view.

As time passed on, and I had no longer been friends with those girls anymore, I learned nothing new about Peaches besides an occasional repost of her finding its way to Twitter. She’d begun to gain around half a million followers for continuing her obnoxious posts where she’d put menstrual blood on her face, eat her feces out of the toilet, run around naked, etc. It wasn’t until recently that the posts I saw on Twitter became more frequent because of a live she’d posted claiming that she’d been tired of arguing with her daughter and initially had planned to pimp her baby. There were videos of her on the phone with men bargaining how much the baby was worth and if she—an infant—was a virgin (Primink, 2019.) While this did result in a fair number of users unfollowing her, many remained invested in commenting their disgust of her for making such claims. After a while, she made a post saying that she was going to kill her baby—which she later updated by posting a video explaining how she’d killed her. Her accounts had been removed several times, and yet each time she’s returned gaining more fame.

There have been theories about why Peaches has the online platform that she has. Several speculated that she just does it for the entertainment of others while others believed it was because she’s suffering from some mental illness. A Youtuber, who contacted authorities after her more vulgar posts, was informed by the police that Peaches experienced an extremely traumatic event during her childhood as well as lost her mother and was placed into foster care (Primink, 2019.) I believe that a portion of this trauma must deal with her initial posts. This being that she had been used sexually by several men. I don’t think that she was simply grabbing older men as a minor and telling them to pose on top of her naked just for entertainment matters. Many who speculate about her aren’t aware of her original posts because it’s been lost through several deleted accounts. It would make sense that after running away from her foster home, she may have been at risk of being taken advantage of. There’s something unexplainable about Peaches’ origin story and reasoning for her posts; however, I intend to use the social comparison theory, the effects of depersonalization, as well as the effects of marginalization to speculate a potential explanation.

Social Comparison Theory

Social comparison theory is the idea that individuals determine their own social and personal worth based on how they stack up against others. This will apply to individuals online due to the concept that they need to build themselves up by utilizing other users. According to Festinger (1954), the desire to know one’s own identity mixed in with the inability to know other individual’s capabilities and talents leads people to compare themselves to one another in hopes of driving themselves towards improvement (Honeycutt, 80.) People don’t want to acknowledge differences in one another, but rather how they relate. Researchers have discovered that people desire to compare academic performance, decision-making in organizations, romantic relationships and marriage, gossip, and body image processes (61.) The act of “social comparison is motivated by three drives (Gibbons & Buunk, 1999): self-evaluation, self-improvement, and self-enhancement” (Nortje, 1), while the people who will more commonly engage in comparison are people with low self-esteem or narcissistic traits.

In the case of social media, this encourages users to increase their follower count as well as subscribe to others to keep tabs on people they may find interest in. This may show a fault in the apps themselves. What I mean by this is that users with increased follower counts can be verified, sponsored, and paid based on the number of interactions and views they receive, as well as placed on popular feeds or the trend list. The task that arises from being viewed as relevant online has forced individuals to look inward where they judge and challenge themselves. Another issue that arises from comparing ourselves to one another online is that self-evaluation essentially fails us. If we have an idea of what we want out of relationships and we define them as such, then seeing another couple broadcast their relationship as what everyone should attain or want to be to have a healthy relationship, then we create doubt within ourselves. In doing so, we place ourselves in a position to become lower than another’s opinions which is essentially a form of social comparison that I intend to touch on.

Festinger breaks down social comparison into two types of comparisons. Humans engage in both upward comparison and downward comparison. Upward comparison has benefits for us in certain situations—primarily those that occur offline—where someone compares themselves to others within similar sections of development and interests as them—who are doing better within a specific aspect of their lives—to give themselves a drive towards improving. We’re able to see this in jobs, education, health, and even goals we set for ourselves. If a friend and I create similar New Year’s resolutions and my friend has shown commitment to working on them, then a part of me will push myself to keep going. It’s a sort of inspiration that we feel.

However, we don’t always get the same results we hope to. In the case of social media, viewing these popular individuals and influencers may affect our confidence and self-esteem. Social media is essentially a lie where people only have intentions of showing their most perfect selves. They want to appear as if they live a “high life” (Honeycutt, 30.) So, in a world where users are gaining attention by falsifying their reality, users who are utilizing upward comparison are attempting to achieve standards that aren’t truly accurate. This can create a hostile environment for the user because they’ve now spun themselves into a hole of despair where they’ve lowered their self-esteem even more while initially attempting to improve it. This is the case where contrastive comparisons fail us and make us feel inferior to the other (Nortje, 5.)

Now unlike upward comparison, there’s a downward comparison where we view people who are doing worse than us to uplift ourselves. Festinger breaks downward comparison into two separate categories because the way others choose to determine who is doing worse than us varies. He defines the first as a passive downward comparison—which is what I had initially assumed was the only form of downward comparison. The passive downward comparison consists of simply searching for people who are doing worse than us—which could also be viewed as a downward assimilative comparison (Nortje, 5.) When we think of this about social media, it deals with viewing others who may post their mistakes, pains, negative emotions about themselves, or even people who embarrass themselves online for comedy, e.g., Boonkgang or Peaches. They find themselves drawn to these accounts because there’s a thrill in knowing that you’re better than someone after losing some confidence and self-esteem due to failed upward social comparison.

Aside from passive comparison, there’s also active downward comparison which requires a much harsher mindset. This standard of comparison is achieved by creating one’s hostile environment for another. By this, I mean that they demean or cause harm to others to formulate a scenario where they’re better off than the individual they’ve demeaned simply because they’re not the one being looked down upon. This is also a form of downward contrastive comparison where people feel superior to the person they’ve made feel inferior (Nortje, 5.) We see this online all the time when you investigate the comments of posts and the user that posted will be harassed completely unprovoked by strangers. I’ve seen this personally done by a friend who was the one who had been enacting active downward comparison. At the time, a woman who wore black lip liner posted a video of herself and several people quoted her picture mentioning how her makeup was not an appealing look. As she defended herself, more people attacked her—my friend being one of them. After this turned into a big spiel where the original user’s friends began demeaning my friend, my friend reached out to me surprised by the backlash she’d received. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t acceptable to degrade a complete stranger online, and she found it even more absurd that the woman stood up for herself rather than accept the degradation.

The internet’s effect on how we personalize and depersonalize others we are viewing

Some of my earliest memories of using the internet were pretty simple—playing dress-up games for pretend fashion shows. There was this option to add friends and chat about our outfits or to simply connect. Now, I wasn’t just adding strangers. These friends I added were girls from my school because I always listened to my mother whose motto was “Don’t talk to strangers.” Through these chatrooms, however, my friends convinced me that I just had to create a Facebook account because this was the new buzz. It was innocent, right? Just a different platform to talk about what was going on in school with the girls and guys I knew. Who knew that within just two years I would have at least 80 strangers added under my false name Kiesha Williams, had made a “burn page” about the middle school I was in, and had strangers who were almost 18 try to sexually harass me? I saw my life online go from fun and innocent to something that I can honestly barely describe. I mean, some of these friends who had originally convinced me to make an account used it to publicly degrade me and would never even say a word to me in person. I saw myself going down that same path where I felt free to do whatever I wanted online to defend myself—particularly use language I would ask for forgiveness for every night—because it seemed as though if my mother and the school never found out, then I had nothing to worry about. I felt as if once I was sucked into the world of online, I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I had to see how arguments would play out, the newest jokes, the latest fights, all in all, whatever was dramatic. It wasn’t always negative posts, but it was a large enough portion of my life for me to remember it as vividly as I do.

Luckily, I grew out of the wild that is known as social media, but this paper isn’t about just my experience. I know that I was only ten years old when this began to be my reality, however, when I view the internet today, it is no question that those same ideas of freedom to do as one pleases remain at large. A journalist, Laura Snapes, discusses her own experience online where she believed herself to have become a masochist. Laura used the internet for roughly a decade—which can seem like ages online. Reaching an amount of around 60,000 followers opened her up to the thoughts and opinions of even more. This is because Laura wasn’t just reaching her audience but the timelines of her followers’ audience, and if they replied or retweeted then a new batch of followers and so on.

The thrill of this rise in attention, or internet fame, was that she gained more business opportunities but also finally “retaliate against music’s many dirtbags” (Snapes, 2021.) Her differing opinions resulted in her no longer searching her name because these weren’t reviews from credited critics, but vicious individuals who could hide behind their fake profiles and defend those she attacked. Even though their voices didn’t really matter in her line of work, she found herself wanting to know and interact with these strangers who only wanted to tear her down by use of active downward comparison. “But I was blind to the fact that I was still a masochist. I didn’t consider my articles complete without a reaction. Twitter, teeming with peers, mattered more than the general comments section” (Snapes, 2021.) Laura had placed several thousands of people on higher ground than herself—as if they were the ultimate determinate factor of the quality of her content. What I want to investigate is what is it about the internet that allows us to intensely believe we must be worthy of users’ approval? On the other hand, I think that the users who are doing the judging place themselves above others as a form of active downward contrastive comparisons.

When it comes to the internet, there isn’t much that you won’t see people do for attention. Play pranks on random customers in stores, get their haircut in an active lecture room, and maybe even just shout the most controversial political opinions. This is typical in a world where people will click on almost anything to see what the buzz is about. This is because it almost looks like the obnoxious TV shows that were beginning to die down, e.g., Jackass, Punk’d, Silent Library, America’s Next Top Model, Jersey Shore, etc. There was this rise in fame from doing stunts and harming or degrading one another that carried onto the internet. Unlike television shows though, these were your regular everyday individuals as opposed to actors and stunt doubles who signed contracts knowing the risks of their actions.

In human nature, it’s common for individuals to want to seek the approval of others they meet. Whether it be for friendship, romantic relationships, employment, or even just popularity itself we all want to be accepted by someone. The difference that comes from our regular everyday approval versus online approval is that we aren’t yearning to be liked by tens or even hundreds of people we meet but rather tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals. Users are also more likely to want to portray perfectionism by only showing particular angles of themselves and appearing to be “living the ‘high life’” (Honeycutt, 30.) The desire for the approval of others can also be a trait of narcissism which according to Honeycutt is a personality style that has increased with the growth of social media (25.)

“‘Grandiose exhibitionism’ is bad and reflects being the center of attention, inappropriately disclosing, and saying shocking statements (Ackerman et al., 2011.) Since these people cannot stand being ignored, their inclusion needs are high in terms of interpersonal needs theory. Recall that the inclusion need is the need to be recognized and included in activities (Schitz, 1958). Social media allows lonely people to be included in a vast array of networks, activities, blogs, and forums. YouTube allows people to videotape themselves and advertise their interests to the cyber world” (28.)

Scholars have made reports showing that “approximately 70% of Millennials score higher on narcissism and lower on empathy than did the Gen X user of 30 years ago (Twenge & Foster, 2010)” (Honeycutt, 25.) This data shows that social media users not only have an intensified desire for attention but also less incentive to understand others’ emotions and have a feeling of superiority.

While narcissism can be seen in traits like lack of empathy, superiority, and an intense need for attention and approval, it can also be observed as entitlement and “exploitativeness” (Honeycutt, 28.) When referring to online interactions, this trait in narcissists can be viewed by users’ reactions online to derogatory comments made against them. It’s a mix of wanting others’ approval and feeling entitled to uplifting or admirative comments instead. On the other hand, it would be understandable to say that it’s the narcissistic tendency of superiority i.e., feeling better or greater than others, to express how beneath they view users by commenting the degrading comments initially. Looking at the social comparison, however, we could interpret this act as a contrastive comparison.

I want to emphasize that these feelings of entitlement and “exploitativeness” (28) didn’t begin with social media—though it had intensified—but rather was seen in media as a whole. By the whole of media, I’m referring to actors, musicians, and people who had a lot of attention and influence. Individuals lost their sense of respect and understanding towards those they admired because they were more concerned with the content as opposed to the health of the individual. For instance, Hip-Hop artist Chance the Rapper was known for his usage of Lysergic acid diethylamide also known as acid or LSD. It was the inspiration behind his hit mixtape Acid Rap that caused his fame. After becoming mainstream, he decided to quit his drug usage and continue with his music career. A grand portion of his following was lost because he changed his content. It would be simple to halt listening to his music because it wasn’t their preference, but fans tweeted that they wished he began doing drugs again and would leave his wife because they wanted better music from him. This is just another form of active downward comparison. While it was through social media that I was able to view these comments, the desire to become accustomed to voicing the desires of celebrities has gone on for at least decades. The difference between social media and outside of it is that celebrities can view these heinous reactions to their lifestyle on a much grander scale. The desire for them to be accepted can lead to various life choices which aren’t always for the good of their health but for the success of their career.

The mental joy that comes from observing other’s misfortunes

While narcissism plays a large role in the interactions of online media, there is also something neurologically occurring. Unlike sadism where gratification comes from inflicting pain upon others, Schadenfreude—a German term defined as the pleasure in another’s misfortune—is an atypical joy (Cecconi, Poggi, & D’Errico, 1.) “Schadenfreude is quite a frequent emotion nowadays, being linked to very important aspects of our life, such as justice and social image…” (1.) Studies are conducted where users online are observed to better understand the emotion of schadenfreude. This is unlike users who participate in active downward comparison because that would be more like sadism—where they inflict pain upon someone. Instead, this study focuses on users who are simply observing the misfortunes.

What separates this emotion from the primary emotion of joy is that there are a few distinct differences. An electromyographic analysis done by Boecker et al. (2015) sought out the distinctions in muscular reactions in one’s face. This showed that while the majority of the same muscles activated, there was a stronger sense of pleasure in joy but stronger facial reactions in schadenfreude (Cecconi, Poggi, & D’Errico, 2.) It was theorized that these results were due to schadenfreude being like experiencing envy. There’s a sense of guilt within these emotions where it may be viewed as morally wrong to experience it. Spurgin (2015) compares this distinct form of joy to having a sexual fetish—where it may not be legally wrong, but there’s something inherently wrong with it that incites negative views from experiencing positive emotions towards it. They believed a show of proof of experiencing the guilt of disapproval from schadenfreude was that subjects furrowed their brows while still showing reactions seen in joyful reactions (Cecconi, Poggi, & D’Errico, 2.)

I believe that these feelings of malicious joy were intensified by social media usage because not only are users able to hide their identities but the backlash and consequences are no longer as immediate as they would be if observed in person. This sense of anonymity online allows users to like, retweet, or reply to posts where someone experiences misfortune. Yes, while the studies do indicate that malicious joy does not require an individual to incite the pain, that doesn’t stop them from reacting to it via comments. I believe that this is because no one is there to actively judge them for enjoying said online posts. We can see this via Peaches by looking at her various fan accounts where individuals support and encourage her. This isn’t something that would be done by using one’s legal name because surely the people around these false accounts would hold them accountable for finding joy and entertainment in Peaches’ actions.

Canceling becomes a new form of shunning, which gives online users the belief that they have power over the fate of others—whether they rise or fall

In an alternative case, some users express their disapproval of others like Peaches. However, it takes more than just commenting on her post saying “You’re sick! How could you do that to a baby?!?” It requires taking action that supports the choice of language you’re choosing. By this, I’m referring to the users who decide to “cancel” Peaches. In canceling her, they unfollow her accounts, mute her name so she doesn’t show up from mutual followers, and simply wipe her from their online worlds. This helps a lot of users weed out people who create hostile environments online.

It can be a dissolution however because if a person like Peaches who had hundreds of thousands of followers loses 17 followers, it won’t directly make an impact on her footprint. There comes a point when certain scenarios require more extreme measures of canceling than just clicking the unfollow button. It requires pulling from the real world and placing true consequences on others. Of course, this tool can be both negatively used and positively used. In a negative outcome, users who simply disagree with one another—if persistent—can discover another user’s home address, phone number, employer, etc. to inflict harm. A story mentioned just recently was about influencer Janae Gagnier who had been stalked through her online account and killed. It wasn’t enough for her attacker to unfollow her, so he found and murdered her instead (O’Neill, 2021.)

There’s an extreme risk factor in using the online world authentically because of how easily you can be discovered as opposed to the users who hide behind a mask. There can be some benefits though—especially in the case of Peaches. After her posts were made about Peaches killing her baby, users began rallying together to find Peaches’ location to alert the police. It was later announced that Peaches’ daughter was in fact alive and well, living with family in a completely different state. This discovery wouldn’t have happened had it not been for users who wanted justice for Peaches’ daughter, Kora.

The Butterfly effect from lack of support towards marginalized groups facing psychological trauma and shortage of financial security

While it’s easy to view users like Peaches, Boonkgang, etc., as ignorant, and quite repulsive, we must acknowledge that they turn to social media for various reasons. It’s public knowledge that people can attain fame through online usage just as long as they gain enough traction. Musical artists like Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, and many more were discovered due to posts made online. Lil Nas X had been known before his rise to fame as a Nicki Minaj stan—an obsessive fan—who was popular for his trolling, i.e., gaining attention from obnoxious posts and creating scenario threads. These were regular people who found a way out through their talents, yet Lil Nas X continues to incite shock online to promote his music because that’s where importance comes from nowadays.

I’ve mentioned Boonkgang several times, and while he wasn’t my primary topic for this paper, he shows a very important aspect of why people experiencing traits of narcissism use social media. Boonkgang was obsessed with his follower count. On that note, “‘Grandiose exhibitionism’ is bad and reflects being the center of attention, inappropriately disclosing, and saying shocking statements (Ackerman et al., 2011.)” (Honeycutt, 28.) He desires to be noticed and seen, so he does whatever he can to maintain that desperately yearned-for attention rather than be silenced and ignored. As I’ve mentioned before, with the rise of followers and views online people can receive money, sponsorships, meetings with celebrities, and user verification among many other opportunities. Both he and Peaches are of a marginalized group that doesn’t have the same access to help they need to find positive outlets in the world around them. It was discovered that Boonkgang had been suffering from drug abuse which increased as the intensity of his posts did. In the same sense, I’ve mentioned before that Peaches suffered from sexual abuse and had potentially been forced into prostitution while still a minor.

So, the solution is obviously for their support system to take them to counseling, right? Unfortunately, that’s wrong for them and the whole of marginalized people’s reality. “Poverty can also adversely affect children’s mental health through family and community-level factors. Families living in poverty experience a unique array of stressors (eg, food insecurity, housing problems). These stressors can increase the parental risk for mental health problems and substance abuse, which can diminish their capacity to engage in positive parenting practices (eg, warmth and responsiveness, nurturance, supervision)20,21 and increase the potential for child abuse and neglect” (Beers, Godoy, Hodgkinson, & Lewin, 2015.) Lower-income communities—especially primarily Black communities—don’t have the same resources for finances or mental health assistance. So, it’s up to us to become creative with how we receive the help we need because it isn’t coming from a systematically racist system. So, it wasn’t just about embarrassing themselves online but essentially their survival in a world that doesn’t protect them.

So, who is morally wrong?

Now, I’m aware that I’ve mentioned a grand number of factors in the enhancement of enjoying others’ misfortunes online, so we must ask ourselves who is at fault? If it were up to me, I would say that everyone is. From the viewers who “innocently” click on the clickbait, the ones making posts for shock value, the users in the comments, the government, social media platforms, etc. I think that everyone has played a part in the destruction of how we interact with others online as opposed to in person. The viewers who pretend that they aren’t part of the problem view these fame-hungry users which still gives them views and raises their position on the algorithm so that more people can see the posts. If a person sees that what they’re posting is popular, then they’ll continue because it’s working in their favor as opposed to them just being ignored by the majority. There’s also the fault in platforms because if views weren’t shown and insights on how it’s affected someone’s account weren’t accessible then people wouldn’t go to extreme miles for clout.

Of course, that’s only looking at the surface level. These users who are in the comments finding malicious joy in other’s embarrassment, or satisfaction in tearing down others via active social comparison, are so engulfed in their own personal pleasures that they don’t recognize the damage they’re causing others—even if it seems as if the one posting enjoys it. The one enjoying may be searching for an outlet that they can’t receive due to governmental failures which aren’t easily mended by just logging out.

Solution

To resolve the failures of social media that allow for hatred, violence, and an unhealthy desire for attention, the first step is one simple thing. We must decrease our time on social media. While it may be a relief to turn to a new audience when the one we experience daily isn’t satisfactory validating our needs, social media usually only worsens our symptoms. We have to decide to choose our own opinions and voices over the millions of others. There’s no benefit in comparing ourselves to the lives of others online when the majority of it is a lie to uplift users, and the other section is just others tearing each other down as an alternative way of uplifting themselves. A proposed solution from Emmons & McCollough (2003) is developing gratitude. If we find things that we’re grateful for in our personal lives, we’ll lose the desire to be like others external to us. In the cases that we do compare ourselves to others, it’ll be productively comparing to challenge ourselves honestly and realistically (Nortje, 9.) Prioritizing gratitude over social comparison has been known to lead to “increased positive affect, better sleep, higher levels of optimism, and more prosocial behavior (Emmons & McCullough, 2003)” (Nortje, 9.) An exercise that was suggested to assist us in our journey in developing gratitude is to make a list of five things we’re grateful for in our lives each day no matter how small. This places the focus on the good in us rather than the state of being of others.

Conclusion

It’s easy to look at the world and just know who’s morally wrong based on their actions, but it takes looking deeper to understand the reasoning behind those choices. People are facing various obstacles where they may have mental illnesses that influence their choices negatively. If there’s no one there to assist them, then there’s only so much they can do personally to find a way out of their despair. Some people do this by embarrassing themselves online, and others do it by tearing others down. We desire to see people get the help they need in person, yet when it’s occurring in front of us online, there isn’t an immediate desire to understand and help them in whatever ways we can. In the case of Peaches, she should’ve been removed from social media years ago and given the counseling and housing that she needed. Instead, she was given followers and fan accounts and lost custody of her child.

While all that we experience isn’t just schadenfreude, it still plays a role in how we interact online because when one finally feels free of judgment for their pleasures, they’re more likely to act on them. Just because we experience pleasure from something doesn’t necessarily mean we have to engage in it. Tearing others down, via social comparison, to make ourselves feel better about where we’re at in life won’t change anything about our reality but keep us in a delusional state that is halting our growth. So, it’ll take steps that we may not want to engage in, i.e., limiting social media usage and improving financial and mental resources. This hesitation in change is because of how addicting the pleasures are as well as the racism that destroys this country, but the result will alter the way of society as a whole if done correctly.