Thou Shalt Not! 

Besides our abundant egos, we humans also have a sufficient amount of envy, jealousy, and sadism coursing through our blood. Although most of us don’t set out to deliberately hurt anyone, we secretly take pleasure when someone we don’t like lands in a pickle. We may even rejoice, thereby practicing schadenfreude.

It is one of humanity’s most complex of feelings — twisted yet not overly spiteful, stressful but pleasure inducing — evil, but in a small-ish dose.

Schadenfreude to me is a conflation of jealousy and the state of mind at a particular time. It’s the satisfying, full-bellied, deep-throated laughter you emit when the town grinch can’t sell his house or the Ever-Miss-Correct faces criticism. It’s the ostentatious elongation of the spine and the raising of the chin on noticing that the traffic on the opposite side is barely moving while you are cruising smoothly. Or the smug curl of the lips when a politician you despise is caught in a scandalous situation or the verbalizing of “karma-is-a-b****” expletive over the arrest of celebrities who use their crisp greenbacks to tamper with the college admission process.

Read the full article here: Thou Shalt Not

Read about the cadence of Anaphora, here: Anaphora