Schadenfreude the Antidepressant

 Hello all! 

I still haven't got much sleep recently, because apparently three coffees and a half was still somehow not enough to keep me awake.

...Just why? I'm still nerveracking over the fact that I almost got saturday school today from my economics class just from sleep deprivation.

Anyone laughing? Haha.... 

... No? 

... Just me?

Ok.

How about this. 

Haven't you guys heard that the graveyard is the most popular tourist attraction on the planet right now? 

Cause everyone's dying to get in there!

Hahaha....haha...ha..............ha

....Still not laughing?

....No?

....Ok then well I give up

These are all prime examples of what makes me laugh. Anything from failures or stupid misfortunes to the classic, infamous dad jokes.

Now now, I know what you're thinking. "You must be a psychopath-weirdo hybrid to think those are funny."

Well, not exactly. I'm just being me.

Everyone finds different things funny. Some people share in common the things that they find funny while others heavily disagree. 

In my case, I find a lot of content funny, most of them even being extremely stupid. I would watch even the most random, seeming unfunny videos at midnight like "Super Epic Mountain Bike Fail Compilation" or "Man tumbles down 1600 foot cliff while skiing" or even "How Reddit Ruined Atheism" and somehow be rolling on the floor, laughing within not even 5 minutes. Now from all of these video titles at first glance, they would sound like someone getting hurt in some way or be about the most cancellable topics ever. However, there is just something in watching a biker do a backflip off his bike unintentionally that stimulates joy and laughter and joy in me. Those "fail compilation videos" are part of those "Try Not To Laugh Challenges" for a reason you know...

This reason is due to the idea of Schadenfreude, or "bad pleasure" in German. It refers to the joy experienced from another person's misfortune. While this sounds like a joke of an excuse of being heartless toward someone else's injury, it is just a matter of me finding another part of the video funny instead of the actual injury itself. For example, when that biker did the accidental backflip, it is not about the way he broke his back or his bike being snapped in half. 

I honestly pay attention to the most obscure details, and that somehow includes the angle and the rotational movement that his body was making as he experienced gravity 5 seconds into the video.

Call me weird all you want, but the truth is that we all find something funny that is objectively seen as serious to someone else. For me, laughter can be acheived from not only those "fail" videos on Youtube but also edgy and cringe characters in movies or TV shows that I watch. If you were to search up what really defined "edgy," the internet would refer to it in a negative connotation as someone who acts "dark" and "savior of the world," etc.. 

In all honesty, I thank those people who create such cringe characters and also that random person who didn't quite nail that jump from that playground slide to the outer fence, because their hard work and misfortune gave me the oppurtunity to laugh at something and de-stress from the difficult events in my life currently.

Everyone should find something that they can laugh at, regardless of what someone else might think about it, because in the end, those things are going to be an essential tool to maintaining a healthy mental state.