Envy’s definition always involves the one who feels it: you want to deprive someone else of something you want for… you guessed… yourself. You could envy Arnold’s muscles, but you wouldn’t if you were twice as big. As you can see, Envy is a selfish feeling, it exists around the self.

Glückschmerz and Shadenfreude say nothing about the self. They just imply how you feel about someone else’s situation. Of course 99% of the people who feel them are just envious, that’s pretty obvious, but that’s not implied by their definition.

You could at least in theory find someone whose Glückschmerz and Shadenfreude are not related to envy and instead are purely sadistic. In this situation, you don’t care about whether you are twice as big as Arnold, you have more money or not or if you are happier. All you want is Arnold to suffer, to lose his muscles and be miserable, regardless of your current situation.

Again, it’s just my humble opinion and Arnold is used merely as an example (borrowed from your own text).

Maybe we use a short word like ‘envy’ because the German versions, though more picturesque, are more than our tongues can get around.

Still it’s nice to know that what I feel is completely normal..well enough that someone invented a word for it!

I blog about turning limitation into advantages, and this is really one of them, turn your envy into advantages!

Pretty sure that I will refer to this post from my blog in the future.

Use envy to make you a better person!
Thanks for the idea!
Robert

And being a lover of language, I was drawn in by the new words you just taught me, gluckschmertz and schadenfreude. I suppose one could make comparisons between schadenfreude and sadism, but that might be going a little too far with it.

Thank you!
Cheryl