Bring On the Warm Fuzzies

I was watching an old Trevor Noah stand-up special in which he defined the German word Schadenfreude. It has no true translation in English, but it’s something we do all the time. Schadenfreude is when you laugh at someone slipping on a banana. Schadenfreude is when you’re zooming down the highway at 65 mph and you turn your head and see the traffic at the other side crawling at around 10… and you smile. The word “gloating” is close, but not quite on the mark. I really think that men do it more often. So many are practical jokers, whereas women are more empathetic and less prone to laugh at someone else’s misfortune… well, maybe not in high school. And yet, with each one of Trump’s indictments, I find myself laughing hilariously while my friends at the Democratic Underground are grabbing their popcorn and sitting down to see how Fox and the other media outlets are going to spin it, or what Trump will try to say as a comeback. Yes, that’s Schadenfreude.

And then, there’s the Warm Fuzzy. I’m putting my own spin on it: when someone else does something praiseworthy or special that makes you smile. In 2020, the psychology community tried to give their own name to it – Kama muta – but it’s not quite the same. Kama muta is a general term for an emotion described as ‘being moved’, ‘heart-warming’, ‘stirring’, or ‘being emotionally touched. My Warm Fuzzy is specifically about being moved by something happening to someone else. Maybe it’s because your friend finally got a new dog, after her previous dog died 5 years ago. Or your goddaughter makes the school cheerleading squad. It could be something that happens to a complete stranger. For example, when a black mother and daughter both graduate from med school. Or when you read about someone in the past who did something phenomenal that no one knows about. Like Susie King Taylor, a former slave who was taught nursing in secret and tended to black soldiers in the Union Army. Or Anna May Wong, considered the first Asian American star of Hollywood, now on the US quarter. It makes you smile. Warm Fuzzy.

I want to smile for good reasons. And I want to have as many reasons as possible to smile. I find myself watching a lot of stand-up comedy and laughing at the things I know I do. Or things I know my husband does that I put up with – I usually nudge him when those things come up. But I want to find more reasons. Reasons that go beyond fun memes in Facebook. Beyond the Kama muta of a cute kitty cat on Facebook that goes viral. Many years ago when I was an active Buddhist, the organization I practiced with had newspapers that regularly published articles about people who had something wonderful happen in their lives or had a breakthrough that helped them turn their life around – they still do this. Warm Fuzzy. I have Christian friends who hear \”testimonials\”: again, people turning their lives around and experiencing positive things in the world.

And I am determined to bring more of this into my life. Balance out the schadenfreude with Warm Fuzzies. So, I did a search on Facebook pages that had positive articles. It was actually quite sad. There were lots of posts of old black entertainers… and baby pictures. And then, there were the countless articles of people getting shot. It was actually painful. You would think that more black news outlets would be celebrating Laphonza Butler, the new black woman in the Senate. Virtually no one was covering it. So, if I’m going to pull this off, it’s going to be a hunt. http://BlackNews.com often pops up in my feed with positive articles that make me smile. I’m going to follow them. Drown out the Schadenfreude with Warm Fuzzies.