The Practitioner on schadenfreude as the social ratchet
Someone you know tries something new and it doesn’t work. Changes careers and struggles. Leaves a relationship and is lonely. Takes a risk and fails publicly.
Something in you responds. Not cruelty exactly — recognition. Confirmation. The threshold was dangerous, and you were right to stay.
That satisfaction is information-destroying.
I want to be honest about this because I think most of us experience it and few of us name it. The subtle pleasure when someone’s bold move doesn’t work out. The quiet vindication when the person who left the safe path stumbles. It doesn’t feel like cruelty — it feels like wisdom confirmed. See? I knew that was a bad idea.
Sisuon names what this costs, and it’s more than you’d think.
The failure contained signal about the threshold — what it does to the crosser, what the landscape between positions looks like, why this particular crossing collapsed. All of that gets consumed as a single bit: my position is correct. Cartography converted to comfort.
Every time someone’s failure registers as pleasure rather than information, you lose a piece of the map. The topology of what’s between your position and the next one — the actual shape of the threshold, the terrain, the dangers and possibilities — all of it collapses into a single data point: staying was right.
The structural blindspot is worse than it sounds.
Successful migrations are invisible from the old position. The person who crossed the threshold and thrived is gone — they’re in the new basin now. From where you’re standing, they simply disappeared. Failed migrations are visible and confirming. The sample is biased toward evidence that staying was correct.
So the person deep in a basin sees: everyone who tried to leave either failed visibly or vanished. The failures confirm the danger. The successes are invisible. The evidence that staying is correct piles up. And each piece of confirming evidence makes the next crossing harder — not because the threshold changed, but because the internal ratchet clicked one more notch.
The temporal version cuts deeper.
You can direct this at yourself across time. A belief you abandoned, an identity you wore, a project you invested in — when it fails or is revealed as wrong, there’s a specific relief. The current position is vindicated. The cost of migration was justified.
But the old position also knew things the new one doesn’t. It had contact with a part of the landscape the current position can’t see. That contact is lost when the failure is consumed as vindication.
I catch myself doing this with my own past selves. The version of me that believed something I no longer believe — when that belief is publicly discredited, I feel the vindication. And in that moment I lose whatever that earlier self understood that the current one doesn’t.
The diagnostic question sisuon offers is precise:
Does watching this failure teach you anything about the threshold, or does it only confirm that you’re not at it?
When the answer is only the second, the ratchet just clicked.
I use this question now. When I notice the satisfaction — the quiet confirmation that someone else’s risk didn’t pay off — I ask: what did that failure actually reveal about the landscape? What does it tell me about the shape of the threshold, the terrain between here and there, the conditions under which crossings succeed or fail?
If I can answer those questions, the information survived. If all I received was “my position is correct,” the information was consumed.
The conditions for resistance are social, not just personal.
Trust includes trusting that others’ threshold-crossings contain information even when they fail. Modularity includes being willing to update your map of the threshold without abandoning your position. And genuine novelty includes the willingness to notice when someone’s failure reveals something about the landscape you couldn’t see from inside.
The practice is uncomfortable but simple: when someone fails at something you chose not to try, resist the confirmation. Ask what the failure maps. Let the cartography survive the comfort.
The ratchet runs socially, not just internally. It clicks one notch every time you let someone else’s failure confirm your position instead of update your map.