That said, conforming on a national scale to being comfortable is constrained by the avarice of consumer practices and the difference between workplace and home: Hygge is not Tickle Me Elmo, but maybe it has something to do with the scarcity of a vase.. The Dark side of Hygge.
On Aug. 25, 2014, 16,000 Danes tried to buy a limited-edition piece of striped tableware that was considered perfect for a Danish home. They crashed the manufacturer’s website, and long lines formed outside stores.
www.nytimes.com/...
Can Americans become as happy as the Danes, despite the nattering of contrarians unhappy with the notion of actually getting along with others. More importantly can it be bought, with or without gold stripes?
Happiness is elusive but like enlightenment, is something sought best within than without. Hygge is not necessarily synonymous.
I am watching on PBS, the latest US release of an ITV program, Shetland.
It’s in the genre of police detective procedural, set in Shetland, Scotland UK. As difficult as spoken Scottish is to follow, one supposes it’s sexy because of that.
Shetland is now in its fourth series. A series in the UK vernacular is a six-episode season in US terms. Top Gear has the same terminology issue.
The Wikipedia entry does have series 4 spoilers and more than a few plot twists, so beware. But that is the series’s charm.
What such programs do remind me is that wanting to find answers about loss ultimately have so many questions unanswered. The “detective story” aspect of historical inquiry remains provocative but also futile, especially as epistemology.
“Hygge” got a mention in the script because of the proximity to Norway, as well as making a point about austere interior decorating. But it’s a way of trying to explain how one needs to find comfort in a bleak seasonal climate. One’s high school sweethearts also explain such attractions. Travel to a rainy Scotland helps that as well. When one is a homebody, one gets one’s travel mediated by television.
CR Mackintosh’s art and design also signified the importance of a design totality where upscale design was also democratic yet spiritually transformative.
More fascinating is how vegans tried to appropriate hygge, but there’s always going to be issues of comfort and consuming animal fat, yet it could be said that all comfort food regardless of cultural origin is hygge. For me congee is as hygge as oatmeal.
Similarly all warm surroundings assailed by winter or cold weather could be hygge. The sexism of the Swedish Bikini Team could be hygge and the Fantanas aren’t hygge, but they’re still sexist. Uber is not hygge, Self-driving cars could be hygge, but only at lower speeds, and with snacks. Saunas are not hygge, but recovering from it might be.
Hygge (/ˈhjuːɡə/ HEW-gə or /ˈhuːɡə/ HOO-gə) is a Norwegian and Danish word for a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment. As a cultural category with its sets of associated practices hygge has more or less the same meanings in Norwegian and Danish, but the notion is more central in Denmark than Norway.[1]
Collins English Dictionary named hygge the runner-up (after "Brexit") as word of the year in the UK in 2016.[8] This followed a period during which several books focusing on hygge had been marketed in the UK,[9] such as The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking,[10] Hygge: The Danish Art of Happiness by Marie Tourell Søderberg,[11] and The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well by Louisa Thomsen Brits.[12]
In Frozen, there is a song called ‘Hygge’, which is all about being comfortable.
- The Chinese word Héqì 和气 has the meaning of social harmony like hygge. It also means amiability, kindness, and gentleness. It is often used in the idiom Héqì shēngcái 和气生财 implying that social harmony leads to richness.
en.wikipedia.org/...
There is a hygge industry as if comfort food and surroundings weren’t an attractive idea. but it’s just a social construction. And IKEA jumped on this. It hasn’t caught on in the US enough probably because all the same people who would gladly consume something trendy have been still paralyzed by Trumpery since 2016. Someone did name their apartment complex in Portland OR, Hygge, though:, although you probably wouldn’t build that in the Sun Belt.
One still cannot buy happiness, even if that’s what a society based on consumption demands.
The hygge conspiracy
For all its ubiquity, hygge is also recognised as a self-evidently positive and particularly Danish value. Though the word itself is actually imported from Norwegian, its emergence as an element of national culture is sometimes traced back to Denmark’s loss of territory in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was forced to abandon tracts of what are now Norway, Sweden and Germany. It is stitched deeper into its language than equivalents in neighbouring countries (such as the German Gemütlichkeit, and the Swedish mys) and is firmly entangled with the way that Danish society organises and projects itself.
You could almost see hygge as the private, intimate analogue of the public, civic Danish welfare state.
Both hygge and the welfare state rely on a state of trust, a feeling of smallness (small nation, small circles of friends), and an assumption of equality. Each feeds on the other: the welfare state offers the conditions for hygge to prosper, for it ensures a 37-hour working week and the time to devote to hyggelig activities; and on the other hand hygge’s disdain of hierarchy and conspicuous consumption imparts values important to sustaining a society in which stark differences in financial means are banished.
“In Denmark our basic needs are covered,” Marie Tourell Søderberg told me when she hosted breakfast for me at her apartment – candle flickering, bread straight from the oven. “We don’t need to fight for our survival – and so we have time to do things that we find meaningful.”
[...]
Hygge is, then, a retreat, an escape, a turning-inwards. If its emergence as an element of national culture is often traced back to Denmark’s loss of territory – an embrace of the intimate smallness of newly sharp national borders – perhaps its distinctly British avatar disguises a similar national turning-inward, a pulling-up of the drawbridge against the terror of the world.
[...]
Hygge may be quintessentially Danish, but there is something utterly British about the nostalgic longing for the simple accoutrements of an earlier time – especially if it can be bought
www.theguardian.com/...
There’s even dissertations on it.
- Interweavings
- Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: phenomenology, structure and the context of context
- Money can't buy me hygge: danish middle‐class consumption, egalitarianism and the sanctity of inner space
- Interiority and the constitution of the atmosphere of hygge
- Autonomy, intersubjectivity and prospection in family consumption
https://heinz.sdu.dk:8443/ws/files/38094393/Linnet%20Phd%20dissertation.pdf
Interweavings: A cultural phenomenology of everyday consumption and social atmosphere within Danish middle-class families, by Jeppe Trolle Linnet
and then there’s all those reactionaries that always need debunking, reminding us that it’s all about the message framing.
Says Denmark’s suicide rate has been about twice as high as the United States’ over the past five decades.
— Viral image on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015 in a shareable graphic on the Web
This is the original image prior to framing by M.C. Nissen:
It’s no coincidence, I think, that at the moment of a huge swing toward right-wing populism and every-man-for-himself, many readers feel wistful about a culture viewed as a liberal utopia, where citizens willingly give up a large chunk of private income for the public good.
If we want to truly experience hygge, a cultural commitment to free education and health care — to people over profit — would go a long way.
But listen, I’ll take the cake and candles too.
www.nytimes.com/...