Mental Health
Is Revenge Healthy? Does Reveling in Your Neighbor’s Misfortune Make You A Bad Person?
Retaliation and schadenfreude — why these feel good, when it becomes a moral problem, and what to do instead
“I don’t hate anyone. Hate is this deep, dark feeling that demands revenge. I don’t want revenge. But there are people I never want to meet again. Ever.”
Ironically, this conversation took place with someone I would learn to avoid. Someone who would hurt me. Someone who hadn’t yet learned that relationships follow a dance of giving and receiving, someone who instead preferred to take.
Someone who needed to be taught a lesson.
I don’t believe in revenge. Of course I don’t. Two of the first things we learn as young people are to treat others how we want to be treated and to forgive. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to barreling down the freeway blasting Taylor Swift in my beat-up hatchback years later, wondering if they ever would learn their lesson. Plotting how I could have gotten back at them.
To ensure they would never, ever cross me again.
Hardwired for revenge
You could argue that revenge is part of being human; it’s coded in our laws and our history. The Code of Hammurabi legitimized revenge punishments in 1760 BC and the creation myths of Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology both begin with some version of revenge killings.
Revenge works its way into the news. Michael McCullough has spent his career at the University of Miami studying revenge and forgiveness.
Revenge isn’t so sweet when it moves from theoretical to real-life crises. “It drives crime — up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge... And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump’s presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of ‘revenge of working-class whites… who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalizing economy,’ according to an article in the Washington Post.”
Revenge, then, is important because Western culture is moving towards a social and political culture where lashing out becomes the predominant method of seeking justice — or perceived justice. We see it in professional basketball games. We see it in entertainment. We see it in politics.
The promise of revenge seems to be everywhere. But is it reasonable? Is it natural? Is it healthy?
Sweet revenge
Songs have always moved me towards reveries and imagined revenge. In elementary school I made up a jingle about one of our strict teachers:
“She’s a devil in disguise, and she sneaks up very sly and tells you that whatever you’re wearing is against the rules…”
I shared the ditty with my friends, and it became a smash hit. Sure, my ruse was petty. Most playground fiascos are equally pointless. But the rhyme was important to us. It gave us a small, secret fraction of power over an authority figure.
Today, I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, snippets of revenge floating in and out of my Spotify playlist. Whether driving to work or grabbing groceries, my revenge fantasies never really go away. Perhaps they’re practice. Instructions on what to do should the opportunity to seek retribution become available.
Except I don’t want revenge, not really. I’ve had the chance to yell and scream at people when they hurt me and it only makes the situation worse. So why does the idea of revenge feel so good?
When do we seek revenge?
Studies on revenge shed some light on this question, but disagree on why revenge — even imagined revenge — feels so damn good.
Research published in Science found that “When trust was violated… [research] participants reported that they wanted revenge, and this was reflected in increased activity in the reward-related regions of the brain, the dorsal striatum. Revenge, in other words, is all about feeling good, rather than feeling bad.”
Participants with the most brain activity in this region would even risk personal costs to achieve this good feeling, the satisfaction that a transgressor would not get away with what they had done. Revenge under these circumstances is more compulsion than anything, a chance to exact justice. An opportunity to make the other person hurt, too. Even if that made both parties worse off.
Another study by Ozlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley found that individuals with higher “rejection sensitivity” and more anxiety and depression responded to rejection with aggression — that is, they attempted to fight fire with fire, or get revenge on the people who hurt them.
Sometimes it pays to have a strong reputation, a track record that says, don’t mess with me, or I will make your life a nightmare. Ideally, revenge works to subdue future threats to fairness. But this isn’t always the case.
To pull off a successful act of revenge, you have to make sure there is little chance for retaliation. You have to ensure that your target never sees your clap-back coming and never has a chance to fight back.
Humans tend not to seek revenge when we think it may backfire. We might believe in a religious system that punishes unseen slights and rewards turning the other cheek. Or we might fear for our safety should we take revenge on someone who could hurt us further.
I am not religious, but I still drive as if Karma exists. I get really nice after accidentally cutting someone off in traffic. Perhaps I can redeem myself by driving better for the second half of my commute. I know that life — or even the basic concept of karma — doesn’t work this way. But this mindset keeps me from exacting revenge on those who hurt me. I avoid causing a scene because whatever misfortune I wish on others might come back to haunt me many times over.
And yet not everyone operates this way. “Sometimes people act revengeful when no good can come of their actions, other than to inflict suffering on others,” writes Karyn Hall, Ph.D. in Psychology Today. “Those actions can go to unfathomable extremes. From lovers running over a beloved iPhone… to students opening fire in school hallways, revenge can be an act of anger, hurt, and power.” None of these actions are designed to improve the perpetrator’s life in any meaningful way. Why then do some people go off the deep end to exact their revenge?
We live in an era of glorified revenge movies: here I refer you to The Joker, Kill Bill, Kate, any young adult dystopian future movie ever made, and of course, The Avengers. But there is a fine line between avenging and taking revenge offscreen when lives are at stake.
Any act of revenge that puts people in danger is a step too far. Revenge and all the happy brain chemicals that come with seeking retribution are never an excuse for violence against another living creature. And that chemical cocktail of anger and satisfaction isn’t productive, either.
Journalist Bryan Robinson notices that “People who seek revenge are driven by anger and violence and have not thought about how [to] channel their negative feelings into something positive. They have not considered how they could use their negative experience — the injustice they suffered — to bring about change.”
Yet most people feel bad after exacting revenge when the brain’s reward centers no longer send us signals that retribution feels right and we see the effects it has on our rival. When we get revenge, we also hyper-focus on our pain instead of moving on. Or as Hall puts it in Psychology Today “when people do get revenge, they can no longer trivialize the situation. Instead, they go over and over it and feel worse.”
That tsunami of emotion that comes after someone hurts us is supposed to inspire action, but not necessarily revenge. It’s supposed to inspire us to get involved with meaningful life changes, lead us to join a cause, or reconnect with our support network. Channeled in a meaningful way, complicated feelings ensure that we and others like us don’t suffer the same fate.
Conventional wisdom says that time heals all wounds, but I know from experience that it only blurs the edges of pain and frosts memories until they’re no longer at the forefront of your day. Perhaps revenge, just like all our other unhealthy cravings, isn’t worth it in the long run if we know we’ll learn to grow around the hurt that others create.
Does revenge make you a bad person?
This depends on who you ask.
I don’t normally look to religion for answers. But if we’re trying to unpack a moral issue, it’s at least a starting point:
Taken together, the ideological tomes I chose don’t offer a conclusive answer to whether revenge is the correct course of action. But this jumble of advice helps for capital-R revenge.
Fighting fire with fire is never going to keep the house from tumbling down. But what about the petty revenge, the type I imagine while jamming to Taylor Swift in my hatchback?
What about the guilty satisfaction we feel when the universe sends minor inconveniences to people who have hurt us? When we don’t exact revenge, but our rivals still get what we think they deserve?
Exploring revenge, I asked some of my close friends if they had ever exacted revenge on anyone. Was I just a scaredy-cat? I felt like I needed to find a jaw-dropping revenge story to make up for my lack of malice. I needed drama. I needed insults hurled across the corridor. But everyone I asked confessed that while they often imagine revenge scenarios, they’ve never followed through with revenge. More often, we wait around for karma to take its toll.
Emotion historian Tiffany Watt Smith wrote an entire book on schadenfreude, this feeling of satisfaction we feel when others feel bad. This feeling is universal. “The Japanese have a saying: ‘The misfortunes of others taste like honey.’ …In Hebrew enjoying other people’s catastrophes is simcha la‑ed, in Mandarin xìng‑zāi‑lè‑huò… More than 2,000 years ago, Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia.”
Smith argues that we focus on the misfortune of others to feel better about our failings. That in itself isn’t a reason for concern. “Above all, Schadenfreude is a testament to our capacity for emotional flexibility… Schadenfreude and sympathy are not either/or responses as is sometimes suggested, but can be felt all at once,” she assures the reader with a heavy conscience.
Whether we are dealing with capital-R revenge or minor grievances, it seems like the best way to handle hurt is to be emotionally flexible. We explore our emotions. We imagine revenge fantasies. But the best option is to forgive and not forget. We move forward, channeling those complicated emotions into worthy causes, and healthy connections.
We become resilient because that’s always been the best path forward.
We break the cycle of hurt, because who else will?
What can you do instead of taking revenge?
I get it. My initial reaction to pain is “comparative suffering” — I want the person who hurt me to suffer just as much as I do. But do I have all the facts? Will that make me feel better?
Probably not.
Instead, I focus on what I can control. I can channel my hurt into volunteer work or rebuilding old friendships. I can talk to a therapist to unpack my frustrations, or journal letters to my rivals (but never send my scathing remarks.) If I’m feeling exceptionally motivated, I can try to list what I’ve learned from the experience.
I could use the tsunami of feelings to power self-improvement, chase achievement, and seek a sort of revenge by becoming more skilled. Because once the desire to show them who’s right erodes, you have new skills and not a pocket full of revenge-fueled regrets.
Somewhere along the line, it would also be a good idea to work out some trust issues so this one experience doesn’t affect future relationships.
And I can continue to listen to Taylor Swift as I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. Because revenge playlists are fun. And they don’t make me a bad person. If anything, they prove I carry a lot of emotional flexibility. Because immediately after one song ends, a more cheerful track begins. And this one is about the power of living in the moment.
And that’s exactly what I plan to do.
