How to avoid gluckschmerz about Jeff Bezos’ wedding

You may be familiar with the term schadenfreude – a word many English speakers are aware of as one’s pleasure in another’s misfortune.

Similarly, there is a corresponding word gluckschmerz – displeasure due to someone else’s success/good fortune – and this is exactly the experience many are feeling worldwide about the opulent wedding of Jeff Bezos.

Amazon multibillionaire founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez enter a palace in Venice.

When one reads from the guest list “hair stylist Sophie Gutterman, who styled Lauren’s hair before her recent trip into space,” one gets the impression this is an event mindbogglingly distant from most people’s everyday life experience.

To have a hair stylist is a wild dream, but to have a hair stylist for your trip into space has to be verging on the bizarre. This wedding is bizarre in every way: its cost, the guest list and its location in the fantasy land of Venice.

Taking a glimpse of the outrageous yacht, one wonders where it could possibly dock, and can only imagine the chaos in the over-crowded streets of Venice with security for the likes of Ivanka Trump and Oprah Winfrey.

Looking at the line-up of beautiful women, I find myself wondering where comedian Celeste Barber might be hiding when you need her. She will have years of hilarious Instagram clips to produce.

So why do they do it?

A wedding is a life-ritual and an opportunity for friends and family to come together and unite the tribe, something many young people today seem to be forgetting, opting instead to elope or follow the emerging trend for 2025 in the rise of the micro wedding.

But Bezos and Sanchez have definitely taken a different swing, with an event providing a scant glimpse of family, replaced by staff and networking opportunities, making this a simple display of wealth and opulence.

This display satisfies a need for them and that need is simply “I won”. Being an invited attendee shares in that glory and implies you have “won as well”, and you will be able to talk up the pre-nuptials, collect the exclusive photos and spend years regaling unbelievable stories.

On the contrary, as a non-attendee what that says to you and me is “we lost”. It is an automatic, visceral and psychologically natural response that has us all equating our own lack of success and self-worth.

There are various reasons why gluckschmerz is elicited, including the mechanisms of dislike and comparison/appraisal, as well as the notion of “justice”.

The notion of “justice” here refers to the deservedness of the good fortune. With these feelings exacerbated by the media, which share “the extravagant nuptial numbers that will make you feel quite unwell”, justifying our already immediate discomfort.

This is precisely the discomfort of the Venice protesters, whose banners read, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax” – which I have to say at first glance makes sense, but on second glance is questionable.

It is my understanding that apart from the $116 million wedding itself, Bezos has made multimillion-dollar contributions to Venice establishments, including the university, and is providing the opportunity for a $111 million windfall to the Venetian economy.

I wonder what that has to do with paying tax. If one has the perspective that he is not a criminal, then the two are mutually exclusive. Another statement, “You can’t rent a city for a wedding,” is clearly false because, well actually, you can.

The slim, beautiful women, the big expensive toys, the guest list of colleagues (I do not say “friends”) and the ability to take on such an incredible venue are staggering achievements.

These are things we covet and when we see others with them it turns us on ourselves and our own inadequacies, a determination of our own success, or lack of it.

Why are people protesting Jeff Bezos’ wedding?

It has been written that this wedding spits in everyone’s face, but does it?

Yes, it is tone deaf to the economic and politically volatile current environment, but do they deserve to do whatever they like? Do they spit in our face or do we, in fact, spit in our own?

Bringing us back to Earth is the experience on the bow of the super yacht. This involved a piddling amount of foam spewed out for a photo opportunity where Bezos and his bride, scantily clad, jump up and down with a hat on. (Why the hat?)

And one is left wondering about the purpose of such an event.

Thinly disguised as fun, we see Bezos skulking off to one side, someone else jumping overboard (no doubt to get away), and one guesses this may be a simple photo opportunity to represent the sexual virility of the wedding couple.

Yet another blow to those of us not “getting any”, but it is so pathetically done it brings it all banging back down to reality.

These people are just humans, trying to fulfil their own psychological needs with a picture of their life as they want it to be seen by the world. Good on them. Should we be reacting or responding, the difference being that one is an emotional trigger response, and the other is a sensible choice.

Let’s stop reacting and start responding. There is every chance you will never have a resident hairstylist and little opportunity to fly in space, let alone get an invite to this kind of extravaganza. The best response is just to enjoy the pictures.