Learn English – What’s the antonym for Schadenfreude

Since the essential quality of schadenfreude is passive enjoyment from a safe distance of the suffering or misfortune of others, I think that the most apt way to express the idea in English might be with the phrase armchair malice.

The underlying notion of armchair here is similar to its sense in the established U.S. English phrase armchair quarterback, which, according to Dictionary.com, refers to

a person who offers advice or an opinion on something in which they have no expertise or involvement

Armchair malice likewise comes from a position of (relative) ease, away from the fray, and with no sense of responsibility for the debacle that unfolds before one's unsympathetic yet delighted eyes.

As for the word malice itself, a usage note in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) makes this point:

MALICE implies a deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer.

Put armchair and malice together, and you get something roughly equivalent to the cold-blooded, essentially voyeuristic pleasure of schadenfreude.

From the Wikipedia section on this word:

An English expression with a similar meaning is Roman holiday, a metaphor from the poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by George Gordon, Lord Byron, where a gladiator in Ancient Rome expects to be "butchered to make a Roman holiday" while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.[9]

Another phrase with a meaning similar to Schadenfreude is "morose delectation" (delectatio morosa in Latin), meaning, "The habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts".[10] The medieval church taught that morose delectation was a sin.[11][12] French writer Pierre Klossowski maintained that the appeal of sadism is morose delectation.[13][14]

An English word of similar meaning is "gloating", where "gloat" means "to observe or think about something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight" (e.g. to gloat over an enemy's misfortune).[15] Gloating is differentiated from Schadenfreude in that it does not necessarily require malice (one may gloat to a friend about having defeated him in a game without ill intent), and that it describes an action rather than a state of mind (one typically gloats to the subject of the misfortune or to a third party).