You Are Not Overly Jealous or Sadistic to See Your Workplace Rival’s Misfortunes — But It Still Feels So Good. Why?
The Myth That This Is About Jealousy
The first mistake people make when confronting this feeling is labeling it jealousy. Jealousy is acquisitive. It wants what the other person has. It burns with comparison and self-diminishment. What you feel in these moments is different. You are not longing for their role, their recognition, or their compensation. Often, you have already moved past that phase. The satisfaction arises even when you are content with your own position. Sometimes it arises especially then. This is why jealousy is an insufficient explanation. The emotional response is not about wanting more; it is about restoring symmetry. Something that felt tilted has shifted back toward balance. Workplace rivalry rarely centers on material outcomes alone. It centers on narrative outcomes: who is seen as competent, who is rewarded despite effort, and who appears immune to consequence. When a rival stumbles, it disrupts a story that had begun to feel unjustly linear. The relief comes not from their loss, but from the interruption of inevitability.
Status Anxiety and the Nervous System
Human beings are exquisitely sensitive to status, even when they deny it. Long before modern offices, survival depended on relative position—who was trusted, who was protected, who was expendable. The workplace, for all its corporate language, still activates these ancient circuits. A rival’s uninterrupted ascent creates background anxiety. Not acute fear, but a chronic hum—What do they see in them that they don’t see in me? Even when you believe the system is flawed, the nervous system responds as though hierarchy is destiny. Their success becomes evidence of your vulnerability. When that rival falters, the nervous system interprets it as a reduction in threat. This is not cruelty; it is regulation. The body feels safer when dominance is no longer absolute. Relief masquerades as pleasure because the mind has no better label for it.
Fairness, Not Failure
What people often enjoy is not the rival’s suffering, but the restoration of perceived fairness. Many workplace rivalries are born not of competition, but of asymmetry: unequal recognition, uneven standards, inconsistent accountability. When someone who seemed untouchable is corrected, exposed, or slowed, it validates a long-held suspicion that the system was not entirely broken—just delayed. The pleasure is moral, not malicious. It says, I wasn’t imagining it. This distinction matters. Schadenfreude, in its simplest definition, implies joy at another’s pain. But workplace satisfaction often lacks that edge. You do not want them humiliated. You simply want reality to acknowledge what you saw all along.
The Private Cost of Professional Self-Control
Work demands emotional restraint. You cannot confront every slight. You cannot question every promotion. You cannot openly express how certain dynamics make you feel. Over time, this restraint accumulates. Rivalry becomes internalized. Anger is muted. Doubt is swallowed. The self becomes a container for unexpressed judgment. When a rival’s misfortune occurs, it releases this stored tension. The satisfaction is not about them—it is about you finally exhaling. This is why the feeling arrives even when you behave generously afterward. The emotional ledger has already been adjusted internally. The system has balanced itself without requiring outward aggression.
Identity Threat and Narrative Repair
Modern careers are not just economic paths; they are identity structures. People derive meaning from being competent, ethical, reliable, or underestimated-but-right. A rival who thrives despite violating these internal values threatens the coherence of your identity. Their misfortune repairs the narrative. It allows your story to continue without contradiction. You no longer have to reconcile your self-image with their success. The pleasure comes from narrative alignment, not dominance. This explains why the feeling fades quickly. Once the story stabilizes, there is nothing left to extract.
The Illusion of Moral Superiority
People are often disturbed by this feeling because they believe moral maturity should erase it. But morality governs behavior, not reflex. The absence of cruelty in action is the achievement, not the absence of involuntary emotional responses. The workplace demands constant moral performance: collaboration, empathy, professionalism. These norms suppress primitive emotions without eliminating them. When reality enforces a boundary that you were never allowed to articulate, the moral burden briefly lifts. Feeling relief does not make you unethical. Acting on it destructively would. The distinction is essential, yet often ignored.
Workplace, Inter-colleague Rivalry as a Byproduct of Artificial Scarcity
Modern organizations restrict far more than they need to. Titles are limited. Recognition is rationed. Authority is hoarded. Visibility is parceled out as though it were a finite resource rather than an expandable one. Even praise is often distributed strategically, not generously. This scarcity is not always economically necessary; it is administratively useful. It creates motion. It disciplines behavior. It keeps people oriented upward instead of outward.
Psychologically, scarcity reshapes perception. When opportunities appear limited, colleagues stop registering as collaborators and begin registering as variables. Their success alters the probability landscape. Their failure recalibrates it. Rivalry, in this sense, is not emotional hostility—it is probabilistic anxiety. The nervous system begins tracking others not because it wants to defeat them, but because their trajectory has implications for one’s own survival inside the system.
This is why rivalry intensifies in environments where the criteria are opaque. When promotion, recognition, or protection are not transparently tied to effort or competence, people are forced into comparative vigilance. They watch who is rewarded and who is ignored. Over time, this vigilance hardens into rivalry—not because individuals are malicious, but because the system withholds clarity.
Artificial scarcity also distorts moral reasoning. In abundant environments, fairness feels expansive. In scarce ones, fairness becomes competitive. People begin justifying outcomes they would otherwise reject. They tolerate inequity as long as it benefits them. They experience relief when a rival stumbles, not because they wish for harm, but because the system briefly feels less crowded.
What makes this particularly corrosive is that the scarcity is often symbolic. There may be enough work, enough revenue, enough growth to accommodate multiple successes simultaneously. But organizations frequently structure recognition as singular. One “top performer.” One “high-potential.” One “future leader.” This narrative forces people into silent competition even when collaboration would be more productive.
Over time, this shapes identity. Professionals begin measuring themselves less against internal standards and more against relative position. Self-worth becomes comparative rather than intrinsic. The rival is no longer just another person doing their job; they become a moving boundary of possibility. Their misfortune feels relieving because it expands space—psychological space, not necessarily material gain.
This explains why rivalry often persists even among people who do not desire power. They may not want leadership. They may not crave dominance. But they still feel threatened by asymmetry. Artificial scarcity teaches the nervous system that stability depends on relative advantage, even when no one consciously endorses that belief.
The tragedy is not that people feel rivalry. It is that they internalize a system that turns shared effort into private competition. Artificial scarcity converts neutral events into emotional signals. A rival’s failure becomes information. A rival’s success becomes pressure. The emotional economy becomes distorted, forcing people to extract relief wherever they can find it.
Seen this way, rivalry is not a moral flaw. It is a symptom. A predictable psychological response to environments that confuse growth with limitation. When the system briefly corrects itself—when someone who seemed invulnerable falters—the relief is not sadistic. It is structural. It is the nervous system responding to a momentary easing of constraint.
And once that easing passes, rivalry loses its charge. The emotion fades because the scarcity has not disappeared—only shifted. The system remains intact. The pressure resumes.
Which is why rivalry never truly resolves at the individual level. It can only be mitigated, managed, or displaced. As long as artificial scarcity governs recognition and security, rivalry will continue to feel both irrational and unavoidable—an emotional tax paid quietly by people who would otherwise prefer not to compete at all.
Why You Would Never Admit This Out Loud
Publicly acknowledging this reaction violates social norms. It threatens the collective fiction that work is purely meritocratic and emotionally neutral. To admit satisfaction would be to admit that hierarchy hurts. So people stay silent. They internalize the feeling, judge themselves for it, and move on. The silence reinforces the cycle, ensuring that these emotions remain unexamined and therefore powerful.
The Difference Between Empathy and Erasure
Feeling relief at a rival’s misfortune does not eliminate empathy. You can recognize their pain while still experiencing your own emotional regulation. Humans are capable of parallel emotional states, though culture prefers cleaner narratives. The discomfort arises when people believe empathy requires self-negation. It does not. You are allowed to feel safer without wishing someone harm. This nuance is rarely taught, leaving people confused about their own humanity.
Why the Feeling Passes So Quickly
What is most revealing about the satisfaction you feel at a rival’s misfortune is not that it appears, but that it dissolves almost immediately. There is no appetite for continuation. No desire to revisit the moment. No fantasy of escalation. The emotional system registers the event, adjusts, and moves on. This impermanence is the clue.
Emotions that persist usually signal unfinished business. Envy lingers because it feeds on comparison. Resentment hardens because it searches for redress. Cruelty repeats itself because it derives stimulation from domination. The reaction under discussion does none of these. It performs a single regulatory task and then disengages. Psychologically, it behaves less like pleasure and more like homeostasis.
The nervous system is constantly calibrating relative position. In environments where status is ambiguous, opaque, or inconsistently rewarded—as most modern workplaces are—this calibration becomes unstable. A rival who appears insulated from consequence introduces asymmetry. Not injustice in the moral sense, but imbalance in the predictive sense. The mind struggles when effort, competence, and outcome stop correlating. Anxiety rises not because one wants the rival to fall, but because the world has stopped behaving coherently.
When misfortune intervenes, the system updates. The hierarchy is not fixed. The pattern is interruptible. Prediction regains traction. That is all the nervous system needed. Once the informational correction has been absorbed, the emotion has no further work to do. It fades because it has completed its function.
This also explains why the feeling is rarely accompanied by imagery. People do not fantasize about their rivals’ suffering. They do not replay it in detail. There is no internal cinema. The satisfaction is abstract, almost impersonal. It is about structure, not spectacle. The mind registers a correction, not a scene.
Culturally, this fleetingness is misread as proof that the feeling was insignificant. In reality, it indicates the opposite: the response was precise. The psyche did not indulge; it recalibrated. Modern culture tends to pathologize any pleasure taken in another’s misfortune, collapsing all such reactions into cruelty. But cruelty is repetitive. It seeks reinforcement. What passes quickly is rarely indulgent.
There is another reason the feeling dissolves: it does not align with the identity people maintain. Most professionals do not see themselves as adversarial by nature. They understand rivalry as circumstantial, imposed by systems rather than chosen. Once the system has signaled that it is not irrevocably skewed, the rival returns to being human rather than symbolic. Empathy, which was never absent, resumes its default position.
The brevity of the reaction also protects social cohesion. If the pleasure lingered, workplaces would become uninhabitable. People would fracture into silent spectators of one another’s failures. That this does not happen is evidence that the emotional response is self-limiting by design. It restores equilibrium without destabilizing relationships further.
What remains afterward is often something quieter than guilt: mild surprise. People notice that they felt something they did not expect, and then notice that it is already gone. This gap—between moral self-image and emotional reflex—is uncomfortable, but instructive. It reveals that much of human emotion is not expressive but functional. It exists to adjust internal systems, not to broadcast values.
The mistake is to interrogate the feeling as though it were a verdict on character. It is not. It is feedback. It says: The system just corrected itself. Once that message is received, the signal shuts off.
And that is why the satisfaction never becomes a story you tell yourself. It leaves no residue. It does not ask to be justified. It does not seek meaning beyond the moment. It does its work and disappears—quietly, efficiently, and without apology.
Final Reflections
The workplace trains people to deny the emotional costs of hierarchy while living inside them every day. Rivalry is not a personal failing; it is a structural artifact. The satisfaction you feel at a rival’s misfortune is not a confession of cruelty, but a signal that something in the system has finally acknowledged what you were never allowed to say. The danger lies not in the feeling, but in refusing to understand it. Unexamined, it turns inward as shame or outward as resentment. Examined honestly, it reveals a deeper truth: people do not want others to fall. They want the world to make sense again. And when it briefly does, even through someone else’s stumble, the relief can feel like pleasure—because relief is often the most honest emotion we have.
References (URLs only)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905357/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153841/
- https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov01/schadenfreude
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597814001327
- https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02077/full
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/20159545
- https://hbr.org/2017/10/how-status-anxiety-affects-your-work
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/social-comparison
- https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-secretly-enjoy-other-peoples-misfortune
- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190923-why-we-feel-pleasure-at-others-misfortune
- https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/workplace-hierarchy/
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