Freudenfreude

I visited New York City last week, cramming a decade of catch-ups into five days. Early coffees, brunches, several late nights, and a wedding. My calendar looked like social Tetris.

One friend recently opened a restaurant in Manhattan and I went for dinner Thursday night. Walking through the space, I recognized him everywhere. The moody lighting, the exotic cocktails, the carefully curated playlist. The same guy who always had a rotation of people drifting through his room and would rearrange the furniture at 3 a.m. because the "energy was off." The restaurant is pure him: frenetic energy made permanent, a vibe crystallized into brick and mortar.

Another friend, freshly back in the private-equity trenches, debriefed me on boardroom maneuvering while her six-month-old supervised from a play mat. My DJ friend is pursuing music full-time, building a community of artists around his sound. My funniest friend has gotten into improv and now performs monthly. Other friends talked about newfound hobbies, decorating new homes, getting promotions, starting new jobs, planning weddings.

On Sunday, on my flight home, I wrote down a long list of all my friends' achievements, and milestones. It was something about watching people I've known for fifteen years become more themselves over time, and how that somehow expanded my own sense of what's possible.

I found myself thinking of an old NYT article from 2022 I had read and filed away: What is Freudenfreude? And How to Cultivate It.

Freudenfreude is the opposite of schadenfreude. It is the joy of watching someone else thrive. And I realized on that flight: I've gotten pretty good at it.

We've built an economy that profits from our envy.

Instagram makes money when you scroll past someone's promotion and feel inadequate enough to keep scrolling. LinkedIn monetizes the anxiety that your college roommate is two promotions ahead. TikTok's algorithm learns that you watch career success videos not because they inspire you, but because they make you feel behind.

A 2021 study found that every additional hour on social media correlated with a 13% increase in comparative thinking and a measurable decrease in life satisfaction. The platforms are literally designed to manufacture scarcity where none exists.

My friend's restaurant opening doesn't take anything from me. But Meta needs me to feel like it does, because that feeling keeps me engaged. The business model requires converting celebration into competition.

We've trained ourselves to view other people's success as evidence of our own failure.

I'm pretty competitive. In business, I track competitors obsessively. But when my friends succeed, I mostly just feel glad.

Mostly.

I say "mostly" because it hasn't always been that way. There were years, especially in my mid-twenties, when I was trying to prove something and couldn't quite figure out what, when every friend's win felt like data about my own stalling. The mental scorecard was real and exhausting.

A 2012 study found that people experiencing even mild depression scored significantly lower on freudenfreude. When I read that, I recognized myself. Not constantly, but in waves. There have been stretches where my brain just couldn't process anyone else's success without my inner critic converting it into evidence of my own inadequacy.

I don't know if I've fully escaped that pattern or if I'm just experiencing a good stretch. Maybe it's the friends, maybe it's therapy, maybe it's just part of growing up. But I'm aware enough now to know: this ease I feel watching people thrive isn't a personality trait I was born with. It's something I've had to practice.

The math changes in zero-sum situations: the job you wanted, the apartment you were bidding on, the person you were dating. When I see LinkedIn posts about founders raising Series Bs or selling startups (milestones I'm still chasing) there's a split-second flash of "that should be me."

In those moments, I have to choose freudenfreude. I have to consciously redirect that comparison into genuine celebration. Some days that redirection is easy. Some days it requires more work.

These algorithms know when we're struggling with this. They serve us more. Because engagement doesn't come from contentment, it comes from the gap between where we are and where we think we should be.

My friend's restaurant is just him, distilled and aged and given a liquor license. My DJ friend channels the same connective energy he had in college, just with better sound systems. My DA friend applies the same moral clarity that once animated dorm-room debates to actual courtroom decisions.

There's obnoxious LinkedIn wisdom that circulates: "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." Usually deployed to justify cutting people out who aren't "winners."

The more optimistic notion: friendship compounds. Your friends' gains create lift for everyone connected to them.

In tech, there's Metcalfe's Law: network value rises exponentially with the number of connections between nodes. Add one person and you get dozens of new combinations. Value compounds.

Friendship works the same way. Every person who grows, starts a company, raises a kid, runs a marathon doesn't just change their own trajectory. They expand the value of the entire network. Their ceiling becomes evidence that yours can rise too.

But that only works if you can actually celebrate their success. If every win triggers comparison instead of inspiration, the network effect inverts. Instead of friends raising your average, they become evidence of your inadequacy. The same information that should expand possibility instead contracts it.

Late-stage capitalism has figured out how to monetize this inversion. Hustle culture, influencer aspirationalism, the entire self-optimization industrial complex depends on us feeling perpetually behind. They need your friend's restaurant opening to feel like a referendum on your own stalled dreams.

We've converted the most naturally abundant resource, other people's success, into artificial scarcity.

My flight back to San Francisco was brutal. Brain too loud, replaying the week. The confidence in my founder friend's voice after closing a big new client. The wedding toasts. The mix of exhaustion and wonder in how my parent friends describe having children.

The trip wasn't effortless. There were moments where I felt that familiar tightness. The split-second thought: "Why isn't mine happening faster?"

But I've gotten better at catching it. At redirecting it before it calcifies into resentment. At choosing celebration over comparison.

Research suggests that even when freudenfreude doesn't come naturally, it can be practiced. The NYT article describes training programs that helped depressed college students through exercises in joy-sharing and gratitude work. After just two weeks, participants found it easier to express genuine happiness for others, which improved both their relationships and their mood.

The mechanism matters: celebrating someone else's win doesn't diminish yours. Your friends' projects don't compete with yours. They're case studies in different kinds of lives. The collective dataset raising everyone's average.

I spent last week collecting evidence that people I love are winning. And that evidence doesn't make me feel behind. It makes me feel motivated and inspired. Freudenfreude might be the most radical act available in an economy designed to profit from our envy.

Every time you genuinely celebrate someone else's success, you're opting out of the comparison machine. You're refusing to convert abundance into scarcity. You're rejecting the algorithm's preferred emotional state.

That's why it feels harder than it used to. The digital infrastructure around us wants us jealous, scattered, perpetually measuring ourselves against everyone else's highlight reel. Genuine celebration is friction against their business model.

And friction compounds too. The friends who knew you before you figured anything out, who watched you become whoever you're becoming, who are doing the same work of building their own lives, might be the most valuable thing any of us will ever build.

Up and to the right.