Misery Loves Company
There is a genre of moral philosophy for which I have particular affection, in which a thinker subjects an aspect of ordinary life to rigorous scrutiny, revealing it to be more puzzling or more profound that is typically acknowledged.
There’s Daniela Dover on condemning others for wrongs of which one is guilty oneself: “the pot calling the pan burnt-arse.” There’s Dan Moller on promising to love someone “till death do us part”—knowing the statistics on divorce. And there is Julia Nefsky on the proverbial wisdom that “misery loves company.” (Additional readings in this vein are welcome: if you have one to suggest, please leave a comment!)
Nefsky states her puzzle as “a tension between two ideas”:
(1) that it seems fine, appropriate and not at all vicious, for someone going through a hard time to find it emotionally helpful to hear another person’s similar story, and
(2) that one should be pained or saddened by the hardship of another person.
We draw comfort when someone confides that they have suffered in the same way we have done. But why? It’s bad news that another’s life was marred by adversity. To take pleasure in this seems like Shadenfreude. Shouldn’t it make us feel worse? Yet, somehow, that expectation is suspended in shared suffering.
The primary goal of Nefsky’s paper is to show that the puzzle is not shallow. Obvious rejoinders either fail or generate puzzles of their own.
When someone tells me that they, too, went through a difficult breakup, but that they’re okay now, I may feel relief on their behalf and hope for my own circumstance. But though it’s real, this comfort is not present in many cases that fall under premise (1): misery loves company even when the misery is ongoing and unresolved. This is the puzzle.
Does comfort lie in learning that one’s hardship is more common than one thought? That makes one’s situation less unfair. But as Nefsky observes with wry understatement, where the desire for fairness welcomes leveling down—the news someone else is suffering, too—“this does not seem like a totally vice-free reaction.”
We are in the vicinity here of the baffling reassurance that “others have it worse.” I’ve never understood how someone could, in decency, draw solace from this. That others have it worse is terrible news. I have more sympathy for the admonition “it could be worse”—which exhorts us to be grateful for what we have and so to moderate our desires. There’s a kind of avarice in the expectation that your life will go better than most. What makes you so special? But while this recognition might be prompted by shared suffering, the sharing part is incidental. One’s expectations are adjusted by the facts of life, however one discovers them.
When misery loves company, the comfort lies in something interpersonal: in empathy, or sympathy, or connection. But Nefsky’s puzzle persists. Connection may be a good thing—an apt object of positive affect. But why is it not swamped, emotionally, by distress? After all, however good it is to bond over shared suffering, it would be much better for the other not to suffer. Why isn’t the predominant emotion one should feel, in every case of this kind, sorrow at the hardship of another human being? No doubt, one may respond that way. The puzzle is why one doesn’t have to—why it isn’t callous or egoistic not to. Nefksy calls this “the problem of insufficient concern.”
Nefsky ends by offering a tentative solution to her puzzle: in shared suffering, a person’s “mind turns outwards … but still in a way that is entirely on the topic of the hardship she is going through. … [This] is psychologically helpful in working through, and thereby to some extent relieving, her pain and worry about her own situation.” When you learn that someone suffered a similar hardship, and your attention shifts to them, you are freed from the narcissism of misery, but not by mere distraction. Instead, you are able to scrutinize your hardship with detachment. Fitting distress at another’s suffering is part of this process.
Which strikes me as perceptive but incomplete. Nefksy’s theory explains why shared sufferers do not diminish the other’s experience—but not why negative affect does not dominate their reaction. In short, it does not solve the problem of insufficient concern. Nor does it capture what is interpersonal about shared suffering. The experience Nefksy describes could happen in isolation, reading a memoir or watching a film. This is not to say it isn’t genuine, or meaningful, but it elides the company in “misery loves company.”
I think the deeper problem lies in premise (2)—
(2) that one should be pained or saddened by the hardship of another person.
—which is an oversimplification. When you tell me that you also live with chronic pelvic pain, the spirit in which you do so matters. Empathy is relational. It’s not just a matter of feeling good about good news and bad about bad news, but attuning one’s reaction to the needs and desires of another in a given interaction. If you confess your condition seeking sympathy, that is one thing. If you want to comfort me by sharing solidarity, that’s another. In the latter case, it’s not merely apt to respond without pity, but inapt not to: pity would be disrespectful.
What Nefsky’s puzzle neglects is our power to set the terms of our emotional engagements, giving others permission to feel, or not to feel, distress or joy—a permission empathy takes up. This power is not unlimited, though its limits are obscure. Sometimes one tries to give permission to another not to feel distress one’s behalf, and fails. The adversity is too great; the audience too green. But when someone has gone through something similar, permission to feel solidarity, not sympathy, is usually felicitous. One is relieved of the burden of giving and receiving pity and the way is cleared for understanding and communion less cluttered by sympathetic pain.
Something like this takes place when stand-up comics deal with trauma: they give permission for the audience not to feel distress of a kind that would prohibit laughter. It can be appropriate for us to smile because they say so—though their authority to say so may depend on their relationship with the trauma in question and on ours. What’s more, permission may be withdrawn. The social, emotional, and moral dynamics of stand-up comedy are akin to those that operate when misery loves company.
That we can license others not to feel such painful sympathy for us solves part of Nefsky’s puzzle: why distress need not predominate on learning what is otherwise grim news. But another part remains—about the positive value of shared suffering and why we seek it out. It’s not just that it turns attention from self to other, or that it forges friendship when one is apt to be alienated. The first does not depend essentially on interaction; and the second might occur with any good listener.
The question, then, is what we gain from solidarity in suffering itself. Is it simply that we share an interest—in chronic pain, colon cancer, or the early deaths of husbands—as we might share affection for stand-up comedy, jazz piano, or flying kites? Is there a special power in drawing strength from what could isolate or shame, as comics own their own misfortune or activists reclaim a slur? What do we find to love in the community of blighted lives?