Hamlet, the most famous Dane of them all, was both fictional and glum. Yet, Sally Laird argues in her Opinion piece for the latest issue of Prospect, real Danes in modern Denmark are the happiest people in the world (according to the best recent investigations into such matters).
They’re not the most economically successful, or the cleanest-living, or the most demanding. But a national emphasis on shared experiences and a “gift for being properly ceremonious without being solemn” have created a society happier simply to be itself than anywhere else on earth.
It’s also a place that might, just, remind the rest of us that man can hand on more than misery to man—given half a chance and a properly assembled plate of herring sandwiches.
Sally Laird you have expressed in your work on Denmark exactly what I discovered during a long exchange at Copenhagen University. I spent a month working in an asylum centre with prospective ‘new Danes’ and was struck how the self-reflexive, efficient locals were yet to surmount this strange new obstacle, and how their inability to do so, more than the migrants themselves, was causing them identity-wracking concern. But young Danes (who work for an endless string of community organizations, or who spent time as conscripts in the war zone homes of the migrants) are, in their frank and unassuming way, making friends with the newcomers and will not long tolerate the idea that there is an integration problem. Rolling their eyes quietly, the same way they do when a train is half a minute late, there is no doubt that in a generation Denmark will have found room by the fire for it’s new members. It will alter the national character, but the pride of pulling it off will keep the ‘hygge’ (coziness) firmly sealed in.
Happiness is always nostalgia, or a daydreamimg. There is no measurement of happiness.Western thinking faculty always count everything in statistical measurement that never be reliable for human nature.
How can you judge every man in statistical agenda ?Is man machine or physical item? what about his emotion which always behave irrational way.
I hate word happiness, I believe in pure joy and self-satisfaction and this is most highest aim man can only achieve by hard work. When I do my best to clim highest mountain I experience pure joy and when I achieve my aim I fulfil with self-satisfaction.
I think this is a highest aim of man`s life.
I have lived in Denmark for five years, and agree with Sally Laird’s sentiments. However, I think that there is something else at work behind the ‘happiest nation in the world’ statistic and that is national pride. The Danes genuinely believe that they live in the best country in the world, and that being Danish is a higher state of being. While this often results in xenophobia and infuriating smugness, it goes a long way towards explaining why Danes say they are so happy. This attitude sometimes makes it hard to be a foreigner here, but the advantages: healthcare, education, transport and the general safety and efficiency of Danish society far out weigh it. If surveyed, I would have to say I am very very happy living in Denmark.
Having worked for a Danish company for twenty four years, I can endore this analysis.
My many stays in West Jutland reminded me of my childhood in Northumberland in the 1950s and 60s. Trust and pride were norms. Respectablilty has been lost in Britain. May Denmark long retain it.
It seems to me that the maximum tax has been lowered from 68% to less than 60% (59%, if I’m not mistaken).
My experience with Denmark was that, although everybody was nice to you when you were a foreigner, as soon as you wanted a job you felt unwanted, and that regardless of citizenship (except for the Brits, which were welcome because of the language; Danes aspire to be British and speak like them!).
I’ve met some wonderful people during my stay in Denmark (I’ve become also a Danish citizen meanwhile) but the general impression was that there are more comfortable places in the world.
Also paying 64% in tax (10 years ago) when you haven’t got all the benefits during the first 25 years of your life seemed to me a bit too much.
It’s a damn’ expensive country (registration tax on cars hasn’t been mentioned, as well as the skyrocketing prices for real estate, which was the only thing which was cheap 10 years ago) and in reality there’s not much of a financial difference living in DK and in a lot of other European countries.
I wish the Danes all the luck in the world in trying to integrate immigrants. I wonder, though, if they will be successful in light of the fact that some of the immigrants come from a tradition that pretty well believes that if you’re happy, you must be doing something wrong. I hope Denmark will change this attitude of immigrants, and I would love to see that Danish happiness spread. I spent a very happy 2 months there some years ago and long to return! Depending on the outcome of the US election, I may have to.