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Completely agree. ivy league grad, started startup, failed ofc and felt worthless for a while.

But it passed away after I got out of the building and talked to other founders, they are in a worse situation :P

My feelings are mixed: I find it both funny and sad that what made you feel better was seeing that others are worse off. Perhaps a reflection of our culture in general?

In engineering we call that calibration. From what I understood he did not felt schadenfreude.

They've done studies about this, basically your happiness is calibrated against whether or not you are better or worse off status wise compared to your immediate peer group.

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