Glückschmerz
The flash of displeasure at someone else's good fortune.
What it means
Glückschmerz is the experience of pain or displeasure at another person's good fortune, the mirror image of schadenfreude, which is pleasure at another's misfortune. The name is a mock-German coinage, joining Glück, meaning luck or happiness, with Schmerz, meaning pain, to label a feeling that ordinary English leaves unnamed; it is not an established word in German, and the grammatically correct form would double the linking s. It tends to arise when another's gain seems undeserved, threatens one's own relative standing, or comes from a disliked rival, and it is closely tied to envy and to social comparison, since much of our sense of how well we are doing is relative. Like schadenfreude, it reflects the competitive, comparative dimension of social emotion, in which others' outcomes register on our own ledger. The term is recent, lightly evidenced, and sometimes treated as semi-playful, but it points at a real and recognizable reaction, and it highlights how thoroughly our emotions track relative position rather than absolute circumstance.
Where the word comes from
The word is a mock-German coinage rather than a term drawn from established German vocabulary. By one disputed account it was coined around 1985 as a joke by a pseudonymous newspaper correspondent, though the exact date and the attribution to any single author remain uncertain, and grammatically the properly formed German compound would be Glücksschmerz, with an extra linking s. The popularized spelling stuck anyway. For most of its life the word was a piece of wordplay, offered as the tidy opposite of schadenfreude, a genuine German loan that English adopted long ago for pleasure at another's misfortune. Its passage into research came later. Richard Smith and Wilco van Dijk, two of the most active scholars on schadenfreude, adopted Glückschmerz in a 2018 conceptual paper as a convenient label for the reverse case, displeasure at another's good fortune, and the term now circulates in a small academic literature. Naming the feeling matters because ordinary English has no single word for it, and an unlabeled emotion is easy to overlook even when it is common.
Why it happens
The proposed engine is the same one that drives schadenfreude, run in the opposite direction. Much of our sense of how well we are doing is comparative rather than absolute, so another person's outcome can register on our own ledger. When a rival, a peer, or a resented group gains, the gain can widen the gap between where we stand and where they stand, and that relative loss can sting even though nothing of ours has actually been taken. Three conditions are usually invoked to explain when the sting is sharpest. The first is deservingness: a gain that looks unearned or unfair provokes more displeasure than one that looks merited. The second is self-evaluation threat: success that is relevant to a domain we care about, or that comes from someone we compete with, is more painful than success in a domain irrelevant to our self-image. The third is prior attitude: we are readier to begrudge the good fortune of someone we already dislike. Envy is the emotion most closely bound up with all three, which is why Glückschmerz is often described as envy's affective residue when a disliked other succeeds. It is worth stressing that this account is largely borrowed by analogy from the better-studied case of pleasure at misfortune, not built from direct evidence on the reverse reaction.
What the evidence shows
The asymmetry in the research base is the central fact to keep in mind. Schadenfreude has been studied experimentally for decades, and its determinants are reasonably well mapped. A meta-analysis by Jens Lange, Aaron Weidman, and Jan Crusius in 2018, pooling data from thousands of participants, found that envy and schadenfreude are reliably associated, with the link strongest when envy is measured as malicious envy rather than as mere painful inferiority or benign, upward-striving envy. Experimental work by van Dijk and colleagues showed that self-evaluation threat, not envy alone, drives much of the pleasure people take when a high achiever falls, which complicated the simpler envy-only story. All of that concerns pleasure at misfortune. Direct evidence on Glückschmerz itself is thin and recent. Smith and van Dijk's 2018 treatment is conceptual, arguing that the two reactions should share determinants because both track relative standing. The most concrete empirical study to name the reaction, by James Phillips and colleagues in 2022, compared New Zealand and Chinese samples of a few hundred people and reported culturally patterned differences in how participants responded to high achievers, which the authors read through both schadenfreude and Glückschmerz. Those samples are modest and the measures indirect, so the finding is best treated as suggestive rather than settled. In short, the mechanism is plausible and rests on solid work about its mirror image, but the specific claim that displeasure at others' success behaves just like pleasure at their failure has not yet been tested at anything like the same depth.
Related but distinct
Several nearby feelings are easy to conflate with it. Envy is the desire for something another person has, often with an edge of inferiority or hostility; Glückschmerz is the pain that flares specifically when that person gains, so envy is better seen as a standing disposition and Glückschmerz as an acute reaction it can produce. Resentment centers on a sense of injustice and can persist without any fresh event, whereas Glückschmerz is triggered by the good news itself. Jealousy concerns the fear of losing something one already holds, typically in a relationship, which is a different structure again. On the positive side of the ledger, its true opposite is not schadenfreude but compersion or sympathetic joy, the pleasure of sharing in another's happiness; schadenfreude is the diagonal case, pleasure at misfortune. Laying these out matters because a reaction people report as simple bitterness at good news may be doing the work of several distinct appraisals, and lumping them together as one feeling obscures what is actually happening.
Limits and caveats
The main caveat is the one already flagged: this is a lightly evidenced concept resting on a well-evidenced neighbour. It began as a joke, its academic use is barely a decade old, and no large or preregistered program has yet isolated it. That leaves several open questions. Measurement is one, because these feelings are socially undesirable to admit, so self-reports likely understate them and may be distorted by who is willing to confess to begrudging a friend's success. Distinctiveness is another: it is not established that displeasure at good fortune is a separate emotion rather than a momentary expression of envy, resentment, or wounded self-comparison, and treating it as its own thing may impose more structure than the data support. There are also grounds for caution about the broader schadenfreude literature it leans on, since parts of social psychology from the era of its key studies have seen effects shrink under replication. None of this means the reaction is not real; most people recognize the pinch of hearing that a rival has thrived. It means the honest description is a genuine, recognizable feeling with a catchy name and a still-immature evidence base, useful mainly as a reminder of how thoroughly emotion tracks relative position rather than absolute circumstance.
Examples
Feeling a private sting rather than joy when a boastful rival wins a prize or lands a windfall is glückschmerz at work.
A colleague passed over for a promotion feels a small drop when the person who got the job announces an early, glowing performance review, even though the outcome takes nothing further from the colleague.
A founder whose startup is struggling reads that a competitor closed a large funding round and notices irritation rather than admiration, because the news sharpens the contrast with their own position.
Someone scrolling a feed feels a flicker of displeasure at an acquaintance's holiday photos and lottery-sized bonus, then a second flicker of discomfort at having reacted that way at all.
A sports fan is quietly deflated by a rival club's title win, a reaction that has nothing to do with any loss by their own team, which did not even play.
Key references
- Smith, R. H., & van Dijk, W. W. (2018). Schadenfreude and Gluckschmerz. Emotion Review, 10(4), 293-304. doi.org/10.1177/1754073918765657
- Lange, J., Weidman, A. C., & Crusius, J. (2018). The painful duality of envy: Evidence for an integrative theory and a meta-analysis on the relation of envy and schadenfreude. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 572-598. doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000118
- van Dijk, W. W., Ouwerkerk, J. W., Goslinga, S., Nieweg, M., & Gallucci, M. (2006). When people fall from grace: Reconsidering the role of envy in schadenfreude. Emotion, 6(1), 156-160. doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.6.1.156
- van Dijk, W. W., & Ouwerkerk, J. W. (Eds.). (2014). Schadenfreude: Understanding pleasure at the misfortune of others. Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084246
- Phillips, J. G., Landhuis, C. E., Wood, J. K., & Wang, Y. (2022). High achievers, Schadenfreude and Gluckschmerz in New Zealanders and Chinese. PsyCh Journal, 11(6), 873-884. doi.org/10.1002/pchj.582