Begrudgery hasn't worked. It's time to break our addiction to 'failure porn'
Look away now, those of you revelling in our collective misery – it’s not all bad news for Ireland Inc. In the past year, 300 new start-ups have opened their doors in Ireland, and average weekly earnings are up by 1.1 per cent.
Consumer-sentiment indices published in September showed a slight upward kink. Despite a wobble this year, the Irish gaming industry has doubled the number of people it employs in three years, to 2,800. McDonald’s, the Danish brand Only and the DocMorris pharmacy group all recently announced expansions.
Of course, we don’t want to read any of that. We are a nation of begrudgers, and as such, we fetishise failure, and are enjoying the prolonged period of schadenfreude the recession has brought. That’s the script, right?
Just ask Bono, who famously said: “In the US, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, ‘you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion’. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, ‘one day, I’m going to get that bastard’.”
Alternatively, consult the current edition of the Lonely Planet, which describes begrudgery as our “national sport”, and accuses us of being “fatalistic and pessimistic to the core”.
Dylan Collins, the chairman of video-games company Fight My Monster and start-up ambassador for Enterprise Ireland, wrote about a similar phenomenon this week in a short blogpost, in which he criticised Irish people’s appetite for “failure porn”.
“A lot of property developers lost a lot of money. Yes, by all means analyse how it happened. But stop turning it into some kind of fetish,” he wrote. “Stop perving on the failure porn.”
As Collins rightly points out, we don’t want to hear about the number of new start-ups, when we could be reading in newspapers, like this one, about all the Icaruses who flew too close to the sun and got burned.
For all our rich literary heritage, it’s surprising that we left it to the Germans to come up with a word for deriving pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. But we’ve taken their schadenfreude and raised them a word of our own.
“Begrudgery” is the very Irish art of not being able to take pleasure in the success of perfectly nice, talented people such as Cecelia Ahern, Ryan Tubridy, Bill Cullen, Harry Crosbie or Rosanna Davison. It’s that urge you get to stick pins in your own fingernails when you see a photo of Rory McIlroy and Caroline Wozniacki gazing at each other lovingly.
