Preface:
Here’s another draft from 2014 that never got finished. Let’s see if we can finish it now! And provoke discussion! BTW, newer readers– back in the day when we had more bandwidth (though I’m not sure why we had more bandwidth? I guess everything was easier pre-Trump) we used to occasionally post deliberately controversial posts wherein we would post what was basically a position piece and then encourage discussion (both assenting and dissenting) in the comments. (If we didn’t want to allow for dissent, we would not post with the debatable or deliberately controversial tags.) (Debatable was for smaller posts where we didn’t feel like there was as much discussion to be had.) If you’re interested in the conversations from these, check out the “deliberately controversial” tag and especially read through the comments section– Grumpy Nation has always been full of intelligent and thought-provoking commenters.
This post was inspired by the comments section in a lauravanderkam post.
crabs in a bucket, mommy blogs
We don’t go those places anymore. (One of us never did)
Love leightpf.wordpress.com Read the patty books by carolyn wells… Change the radio station…
chat history 5/6/14
Alas, google conversations seems to have deleted the chat history from before a certain point. 2014 definitely isn’t in there. So much lost! Leightpf.wordpress.com is now private access, but it was a wonderful blog from someone who spoke confidently (and correctly!) about personal finance, particularly personal finance for upper-middle-class earners. Unapologetic. The Patty Fairfield books are an early 20th century series about a nice girl who was always the “popular girl” and was from a working-rich family (her dad is a lawyer, IIRC) and everyone liked her and she did fun things– free on gutenberg or for kindle. (Her mom did die before the series started, but her father eventually remarried one of her older friends, which is a bit sketchy.) The comments on the goodreads post for the second book sum up how it’s an antidote to h8ers. Ok, with that context (or lack therof)… what was it we wanted to say?
Post start:
In the comments section of a Laura Vanderkam post, Leanne says:
I also don’t understand why most people respond so strongly to the “hardship” stories. It’s not my personal preference; I find “success” stories much more interesting. I’d rather look up for inspiration than down for validation, but I think that viewpoint is more the exception than the rule, unfortunately, at least for adults.
We agree. I feel really sad when my friends have to deal with hardship and health problems (and I listen because it’s my friend!) and I certainly don’t actively seek out such stories from other people.
Many people do. They prefer blogposts where people have hardships and health scares. They love when someone’s “perfect” life is shown not to be so perfect after all. They love divorces and finding out the gossip of what happened to cause the divorce (so long as it’s not the boring “we grew apart”). The Financial Blogsnark sub-reddit is almost entirely comments about some woman named “Hope” who has been a financial train-wreck for over a decade. (How do I know this? I don’t keep up regularly with many personal finance blogs anymore, but saw a post title on a blog roll and checked in and then I, TBH, wondered what had happened to the Frugal Girl when she signed a new lease and this sub-reddit had the whole story. That said, I would have been happier with “we grew apart.”)
Back in the day, I used to spend a lot of time on mommy forums and mommy blogs, and there was definitely a big negative contingent of people who loved to hate on successful women. (And lots of dramatic fights about WOHM vs. SAHM etc. etc. etc.) It was a big time-suck, and although some useful things came out of participating in those fora and reading those blogs, it’s nice to be away from the drama and negativity. IRL, people just aren’t that negative when your kids are doing well and you’re balancing work and child-rearing like they are online. Maybe they feel that way deep down, but at least they’re polite enough not to say anything or to yuck anyone’s yum, so to speak. Or at least not to me.
I don’t know what the scientific evidence says– do people prefer sad or happy things? Popular fiction sales suggest that the average person likes to read about people getting out of bad situations. So maybe a little bit of both? And, of course, there’s also the people who enjoy best sellers of fine literature where everything ends sadly.
So it could just be that there are different kinds of people. There’s a couple of econ papers that find that on average people are happier getting off of Facebook, but that is driven by the contingent of people who get jealous of others’ successes. Not everyone feels threatened by curated lifestyles, but a good proportion of people do. Not everyone likes reading sad stories, but a good proportion of people do. Some people really do enjoy schadenfreude.
For another perspective, in the comments section Ana says:
As far as why negative posts get more interest, its likely partly because we find flaws more relatable than perfection… if someone describes a challenge they are facing, I can give advice, support, commiserate, & also learn from the advice and experience of other commenters—much more of a productive discussion.
Which may be true for some, but there are definitely people who are there for the schadenfreude and not to help.
Grumpy Nation: Do you think people enjoy when good things happen or bad things happen to other people? Under what circumstances? Discuss in the comments below!
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
May 1, 2024 at 4:26 am
Depends on the person and my life stage. At the micro level, in the PF world, I can learn more from people who are real and that means imperfect, and I also prefer for bad things to happen to bad people and good things to happen to people I like because I trust they are generally good people at heart. Obviously my preference doesn’t have any impact on what actually happens but that’s how I hope things will shake out more than not. So I do appreciate when bad things happen to terrible people if it’s not also happening to good people. I’m not necessarily cheering it on, definitely not when it’s something like a natural disaster or something with scale, but personal tragedies for certain people, war crimers and Trump and the cops murdering civilians, or tear gassing the protestors, and the like? Absolutely. I wish nothing good for them and everything good for all the people who are genuinely doing their best to make it in the world, to do less harm, and to help others. Maybe that’s petty but I don’t care, it’s just how I feel. My feelings have no real impact on how good and bad things unfold.
May 1, 2024 at 6:46 am
I wouldn’t say I prefer hardship because of schadenfreude specifically, moreso because I find the perfectly curated life to be fake and unrelatable. Plus as ana said, if they are going through a tough time offering advice is a way of starting conversation and building community. If everything is just perfect all the time (or only imperfect in perfectly curated ways) what is there to bring people together other than commiserating over whether gel or dip manicures are better? I recently stopped reading my last mommy-influencer blog because the comment section had deteriorated into cheerleader worship from wannabe fangirls… no hardship or non-conforming opinions permitted, and because the content was the same every day.
May 1, 2024 at 8:32 am
“because I find the perfectly curated life to be fake and unrelatable”
Same. I don’t really follow “content creators” (ugh! I hate that term) who operate from this perch of perpetual perfection. I understand they curate the persona because their goal is to make money, but it doesn’t mean I have to partake.
Btw, this holds in real life, too. You can’t have a deep relationship with someone who absolutely refuses to show any vulnerability. Granted, it can be because they don’t trust you in particular, or because they have issues opening up, or a whole slew of other reasons, but without vulnerability there is no closeness, and at my age I am not particularly interested in adding to my already vast collection of superficial relationships.
The flip side are people (and “content creators”) who are in a state of perpetual drama and chaos. I stay away from them, too. Disaster magnets are an energy drain in real life, too.
Honestly, I like the content made by people who seem generally content and competent at life, and perhaps have some interesting skills and/or opinions, but also appear real and fallible, like the rest of us.
May 1, 2024 at 2:16 pm
Oh, right the constant complainers. I feel like some people just enjoy the attention and feeling like martyrs. But it gets so old, especially the ones who just have normal problems. Obviously, some people really do have loads of horrible problems, and my philosophy is that if they have to live through them, I should be able to stand to listen to them. But when no solution could possibly work, so much so that they refuse to believe that things could ever get better for them, it gets old.
May 3, 2024 at 11:09 am
@debomill — I guess in some cases it may be “attention seeking” or “martyrdom”, but maybe sometimes the person is actually processing something, and/or going through a difficult time in their lives that might not be easily solvable by a stranger on the internet who doesn’t have the full story, and which might not improve over the short duration that apparently some readers demand. I’m sorry you find that tiresome! Yowzers!
May 3, 2024 at 11:28 am
I dunno, I think I know what Xyk is talking about. Some people seem a little performative about things. Like Sanda Tsing Loh syndrome.
May 1, 2024 at 8:41 am
Hmm, I don’t know. If you ever read GOMI, which I haven’t in many years, there were whole contingents of people who really enjoyed hating on the bloggers and seemed to genuinely enjoy it when something bad happened to them.
Internet trolls aside, I think there is a natural human desire to differentiate ourselves from other people when something bad happens to them. Well, this person posted too much about her kids, so no wonder one of them is having mental health issues. Well, this person smoked, so no wonder they got cancer. If I don’t do those things, then those bad things won’t happen to me. I think that tendency is even more pronounced when it’s someone on the internet who may not fully seem like a real person to us (and frankly, they’re not–they’re a public internet version of a real person). That is obviously magical thinking, but I’ve observed it often, including in myself. So in these cases I think it’s less of an enjoyment of something bad happening to someone else, more of a hope that if the bad thing was their fault, it won’t happen to me.
Regarding quitting facebook, I kind of quit about a month ago. I realized that mostly what I saw was 1. ads, 2. a family member publicizing drama that should be private, 3. people I know showing me social events to which I had not been (and wouldn’t have expected to be) invited, a very distant 4. major interesting life events I did want to know about. So, 1. don’t want to see, 2. don’t want to see, 3. not interesting to me, 4. interesting, but not worth slogging through 1-3. I open the site every couple of days to see if there are new posts in the two groups I’m in where I often help people and get important information (neighborhood and school groups), but I’ve stopped looking at the feed at all. I also sometimes use marketplace because apparently craigslist is not a thing anymore where I live. This feels like a good way to interact with the site for me. It sure takes less time!
May 1, 2024 at 10:22 am
Here’s our decade-old thoughts on GOMI: https://nicoleandmaggie.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/ponderings-on-blogging-pet-peeves/
You’re absolutely right about the psychological phenomenon of magical thinking regarding fault– that actually came up in the discussion at a student presentation I went to yesterday on sexual assault reporting.
May 1, 2024 at 2:17 pm
I agree on people wanting to differentiate ourselves from others, to try to convince ourselves that we are safe from whatever bad happened to another person. Death is the worst–everyone wants to know why, as if they can be safe from dying themselves. This attitude makes it hard for us to give proper concolences.
May 1, 2024 at 12:33 pm
I don’t like either end of the spectrum…the perfect, fake and highly edited story or the victim story of things always going wrong.
Now, that being said, when my blog was active it was more of a story that started bad but ended good for 2 reasons. 1) I wanted people to have hope that even if your life is crap now, there are numerous steps you can take to make it better. 2) The place of privilege my family is in now required many years of hustling and sacrifices. (I was white and smart so I had a head start over other marginalized groups but it wasn’t just handed to me like some assume).
A surprisingly huge amount of people were shocked when my spouse retired. Some of them assumed we were poor and that is why we did so many do it yourself projects and had a super old car. One of our neighbors even told us that he doesn’t believe my husband retired by choice and is just calling himself retired to save face. So even people we thought we knew pretty well made assumptions that were totally wrong. I can only imagine how wildly different an internet persona must be from reality.
But to answer your question, those stories, like the am I the a-hole questions on Reddit stress me out. I hate hearing about how so many people are grossly mistreated on a regular basis. I much prefer following the retirement forums hearing about all the fun people are having. The fear mongering has hurt us as a nation and I often need to take breaks from news to reset my psyche.
May 1, 2024 at 1:09 pm
Me too. I wonder if part of it is our first gen not great childhood upbringing. I want to believe in fairy tales and in many ways my life feels like a fairy tale compared to my childhood.
May 1, 2024 at 2:23 pm
The main reason I like hardship stories, at least as blog posts, is that the people I read feel like they have to make them funny to help everyone (including themselves) get through it. Also, sometimes they feel more real and more well-explained, because they are fighting embarrassment and trying to show people that this could happen to anyone and that there is nothing that makes them deserve it. I mean, I guess occasionally people feel they deserved something bad that happened to them.
Similarly, I feel like a lot of the really sad and tragic songs are extra beautiful to make up for it. But I’d also like fun happy songs that are also beautiful and happy posts that are also funny!
I REALLY prefer when good things happen to people. I’m not going to say I never feel jealous, but I never want to act on that feeling. I’d prefer to be inspired (if possible–sometimes there’s obviously no way I can improve in that area) and admiring. I definitely prefer my friends to be smarter than me and better than me at stuff. I like to assume that everyone’s marriage is going well. However, I feel like I’m a weirdo in this.
The first time I heard of someone not liking someone just because they were awesome was when we had to read “Billy Budd” in school. I really didn’t get it. I guess I still don’t. I’ve also heard that when fat people lose weight, suddenly some of their friends get angry, especially friends who are now more overweight than them. Apparently they could feel better about themselves as long as there was someone in worse shape around, and now this person is proof that losing weight is possible and since they haven’t, they’re a failure or something.
**
‘Maybe they feel that way deep down, but at least they’re polite enough not to say anything or to yuck anyone’s yum, so to speak. Or at least not to me.’ – One thing Trumpism has taught me is that a LOT of people think horrible thoughts and have, until the past decade, been polite or embarrased enough not to bring them up. And those are just the horrible thoughts that Trump inspires. There are plenty of other horrible thoughts out there.
**
Then there’s the issue of people enjoying when bad things happen to people they don’t like. This is more understandable, and though I also feel that way sometimes, what I really want is for bad people to realize they have problems and start trying to fix them. This is why, although I watch political comedy, I don’t recommend it to anyone, because they’ll often focus on physical flaws and other things that don’t matter at all. (Trevor Noah was better than average about this but not immune.)
May 1, 2024 at 4:01 pm
I’m actually a little more optimistic re people deep down. In that I think a lot of people are easily swayed by propaganda. We all want to be good people mostly but for many, what that looks like is heavily influenced by what people are telling us. Yes there are plenty of bad people but the vast majority of people who currently believe hateful things would be the opposite if they were surrounded by people propagandizing them to be actually good people.