* There’s something of a joke among world travelers and ex-pats that “hygge” is Danish for “hook up.” When a Danish girl takes you to show you “hygge,” it means you’re getting laid. The Danes are remarkably sexually liberal once you’re accepted but that’s a steep climb. I’ve never been in a country with such a sharp dichotomy between stranger and friend, or one that was so coldly unfriendly to strangers.
* People who criticize Hygge, probably were not happy children. They did not have parents who let them roast hotdogs in the fireplace, make fondue in the pot that has been in mom’s kitchen since the 60′s; and learned to play the all important card games. Hygge is pretty universal as far as “I’m stayin’ in, and getting into my jammies early.”
* Quite aside from the obvious angle of this being an attack on traditional European culture, I think there is something more going on, in addition to that.
Hygge is obviously something that doesn’t fit well with neoliberal values, which are about being restless, insecure, and thus turning to consumerism to fill that empty hole.
Hygge is about being happy, satisfied, content, not hustling, not on the make, satisfied with small comforts – in the original NYT article, a Danish person was quoted as saying the Danish are so happy because they take satisfaction in small things. Sounds almost Buddhist, although really all spiritual traditions counsel this approach, including most of the Hellenistic ones.
Well, that is obviously a threat to capitalism and indeed the whole modern way of life!
One thing I have discovered about people committed to capitalism and the neo-liberal way of life is that they are deeply, deeply, threatened by anyone or anything that seems to call into question their values. You must subscribe to their notion of the good life as being about buying stuff, gadgets, and working really hard to buy stuff and have gadgets, and under no circumstances must you be allowed to be satisfied with small comforts that make you happy!
When I first started developing an interest in non-materialistic spiritual traditions the hostility and mockery I met with from the hard working neoliberal types was astonishing to me – I didn’t expect sympathy, but I expected indifference at worse. They would pity me as the poor soul who missed out on the point of life – to work really hard to buy stuff, according to them.
But no. What I got instead was something resembling rage. Clearly, I was challenging a very brittle facade they were trying to maintain – they knew on some level that they were missing out on the best things in life, and they responded with rage at my deviation from their accepted norm, which reminded them of what they had given up.
