Hygge Not Drygges

As America yelled at itself today over whether we should be more outraged that a Congressional candidate referred to the President as a 'motherfucker' or the fact that he confessed to grabbing them by the pussy (among a list of grievances too long to chronicle in the time I've allotted myself today*), I found myself drawn to a Freakonomics podcast entitled How to Be Happy.

* At the risk of pulling back too much of the curtain and exposing long-standing secrets, I generally allot myself about 15 minutes to crank out a post. I don't edit much. Stream of conscious dipshittery is the best kind, I find.



The secret, it turns out, is hygge.

We'll let Meik Wiking explain. Wiking is the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. Denmark is routinely ranked at the very top of the world's countries in the United Nations' annual World Happiness Report. (Dude's name is pronounced Mike Viking. That'd make me happy, too.)

Wiking defines hygge (pronounced hoo-guh) thusly, "So I think the best explanation of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. So it’s about togetherness. It’s about pleasure. It’s about warmth. It’s about relaxation. And that is a key cornerstone of Danish culture. To Danes, hygge is perhaps what freedom is to the Americans."

It also involves candles, apparently. Listen to the podcast. It's fascinating.

The podcast goes on the explain that Danes have a significantly higher opinion of governmental institutions and closer societal bonds than many other developed nations. There's an implicit social trust that many Danes attribute to the extremely generous economic safety net made possible by the country's very high (50% of income, on average) individual income tax rates. That same taxation policy tends to depress income inequality, which also contributes to everyday Danes' sense of shared community.

All of which got me thinking about a conversation I had with my daughter's boyfriend over the holidays. He's a very sharp kid, a high-achieving student in a challenging STEM program. He also professes to be a communist. More of the live-on-a-commune kind of communist than a hammer and sickle command economy communist, as it turns out, but a communist nonetheless.

So I had some questions. I offered that I found that capitalism, while flawed, is the best system ever created in terms of raising the average standard of living in a population. Sure, I allowed, there are winners and losers in capitalist societies, and society has an obligation to those less fortunate, but the aggregate benefit is worth it, the rising tide that lifts the boats. He sees it differently. He's 17, so Winston Churchill's adage about conservatism and age applies to some degree, but his position wasn't whimsical - he's thoughtful and well-read on the topic. (Churchill didn't actually say the quote in question, but nobody comes here for accuracy.) We agreed to disagree about the practicality of society-wide communism, in the end.

But after learning more about the Danes and the balance they've struck, and how it contributes to the general welfare, I wonder if I'm right.

My daughter's boyfriend is tall and blond. I think he'd make an excellent Dane. He's got huge hygge.