Women could still be feminists, she argued, while being competitive. Now, I know women are entirely as capable of being jerks and bullies as men are. Women are, after all, human. But I was stunned because the obvious conclusion was omitted: such women, or people, do exist, but you must not make them your friends; you must run from them (the best term for such creatures is grimalkin; it’s now out of usage, but means ‘a spiteful old woman’). Seriously, run. Then, carefully, draw the brilliant, the decent and the good-hearted near, and love them fiercely. Shed the toxic and the small; show loyalty and honour to those you love. It’s not an accident, it’s purposeful. Stand by your friends and spend time with those who’d rather swill acid than hurt you.
There are millions of excellent humans on the globe. Find them. Befriend them. Support them. And soon a plant with a thick trunk and roots will grow. Weed out those who spike conversations with put-downs, who are disloyal or unkind, who don’t give you the benefit of the doubt and badmouth you to strangers. Because if you are mentally weighing your friends when they walk into a room, the question you must ask yourself is not ‘Am I a feminist?’ but ‘Am I a dickhead?’
GORE VIDAL, A MAN not known for his humility or lack of ego, said that when a friend succeeds, ‘a little something in me dies’. I disagree. People often talk about Schadenfreude, delight in the misfortunes of others, but they seldom discuss its opposite, Freudenfreude. One of the greatest, little discussed joys in life is the way you feel when a friend takes off in flight.
I realised this when my friend Catherine Keenan was made Australian of the Year Local Hero in 2016. I sat at home watching the TV as, under a grim, grey sky that was spitting rain, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull struggled to hold an umbrella over her head. Cath is the cofounder and executive director of the Sydney Story Factory, which runs creative writing classes for underprivileged school kids, a quarter of whom are Indigenous. Housed in a building in Redfern known as the ‘Martian Embassy’, the whole enterprise has seen the minds of thousands of young people, from seven to seventeen, bubble and erupt into poems, plays, essays, stories and books, under the gentle eyes of more than a thousand trained volunteers.
On that night, eyes plastered to TVs and madly texting, Cath’s tribe was splitting with pride as we watched her walk across the stage to give her speech, still in shock, as the wind whipped her curly mane. As she then said:
Telling stories is a fundamental part of being human. ‘It’s how we understand the world around us and how we convince others to work with us to change it. It is also — and anyone who sat with a child will tell you this — a profoundly and often wildly creative act. Telling stories is the way we take the complicated emotions and weird spirallings of imagination inside us and give them shape and form. It is how we show who we are to the world.
And it’s hardly just an abstract indulgence, she added:
We know the huge benefits of helping young people tell their stories. We know it because a growing body of research demonstrates the many and varied benefits that accrue for young people. They are more likely to go on to tertiary education, they watch less TV, they are more likely to volunteer in their community. I have seen it time and again. When kids are able to tell their stories, they stand just that little bit taller.
My chest hurt with pleasure watching her, and I began to think about why we so rarely acknowledge the joy of watching someone you love triumph — for example, when a friend is acknowledged for years of quiet, hard, important work, or finally lands a ball between goalposts and makes a dream concrete through determined effort. I was watching the same friend who had driven for two hours every week for six weeks to play with my toddler who was in hospital with a broken leg, so that I could sneak off to the café downstairs and write my book on Queen Victoria; who baked large piles of chicken schnitzel and cauliflower soup when I was ill myself, and has hosted numerous twelve-hour birthday lunches for all of us; who, when we were newspaper cadets in our twenties, was always the last to leave any party.
I could barely sleep the night of her award as I lay in bed thinking of the excitement in Cath’s voice when she had called to tell me, as I was walking along a street in Philadelphia, that she was going to leave The Sydney Morning Herald and set up the Sydney Story Factory with lawyer, Herald colleague and top bloke Tim Dick, after being inspired by US author Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia in San Francisco. I thought about the gruelling months she had spent labouring on funding applications and wrestling with budgets, and the hours we had all spent painting the slats that formed the Martian Embassy walls, which were arranged in rows to create the illusion of being a portal to another world, the belly of a whale, or even part of a spaceship.
BUDDHISTS CALL IT MUDITA — a delight in another’s good fortune, or an unselfish joy. The Yiddish word nachas has a similar meaning of pride in someone else’s accomplishments, usually referring to one’s children. Another slightly different but rarely used word with a similar meaning is confelicity — pleasure in another’s happiness. In recent years, psychologists studying this concept have coined the term Freudenfreude to describe the opposite of Schadenfreude, and it means genuine rejoicing in another’s success. I am not sure why we allow Freudenfreude to be permanently overshadowed by its evil twin Schadenfreude when it is equally useful as a word and a far superior emotion. Psychologists have found that Freudenfreude is actually an effective bulwark against melancholia or sadness, a simple way, in other words, to get out of your own head and bask in borrowed sun.
Gore Vidal was wrong: it’s not the success of our friends that is bad for us, but not relishing it. There is some evidence that a lack of Freudenfreude can actually make you depressed. Experiencing it is something we need to work on; it’s an attitude, or a habit of thinking, that we need to coax our minds into. We encourage people to feel compassion for those who struggle, so why not also encourage Freudenfreude for those who triumph? It’s the antidote to envy.
Psychology professor Catherine Chambliss has been studying Freudenfreude for years. She conducted an experiment with severely mentally ill people in a residential psychiatric facility to try to establish if managing competitive impulses and friendship could help stem depression in a clinical setting. She and her colleagues spent time with staff and patients talking about how to consciously, deliberately and genuinely celebrate the successes of other people, in what they called ‘Freudenfreude Enhancement Techniques’. In her book Empathy Rules: Depression, Schadenfreude and Freudenfreude, Chambliss writes that, while the strategy did not provide ‘a miracle cure’, there were some startling results. For example, there was a ‘discernible positive influence on morale’, the number of incidents of assault and self-injury declined, and the number of successful discharges ‘increased dramatically’. Professor Chambliss concludes: ‘Empathy works wonders. Failures of empathy can be a big problem. Failing to respond with empathy to a friend’s success or setback may prove toxic to relationships, undermining one’s social support and possibly leading to social isolation and the depression it all too often produces.’
In 2016, Professor Chambliss replicated her findings in a study in Europe, which found that students and hospital patients with depression had higher levels of Schadenfreude and lower levels of Freudenfreude. She and her co-author admitted that they did not know if these differences ‘might contribute to the development of depression, be a consequence of it, or both’. At any rate, it makes sense.