Pia Hansen: Rotten? Turns out Denmark happiest of all
My e-mail inbox was busy this week as friends and foes sent me links to a story about how Denmark is the happiest country in the world.
BBC reported that Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist from the University of Leicester in Britain, used the responses from 80,000 people to map out well-being and happiness.
Somehow Denmark came in first, followed by Switzerland, Austria and Iceland, with the United States at No. 23 and Burundi coming in last, at No. 178.
As someone who grew up in Denmark and lived there until I was 25, I’m not quite sure how a nation that’s made complaining over taxes, the weather and the latest soccer loss a national pastime can be the happiest nation in the world.
Heck, people don’t even say “hello” to each other on the bus there.
Perhaps my fellow Danes lied on those survey cards, to poke fun at the researcher.
That’s Danish humor for you right there: “Hey, let’s tell him we laugh so much all day we are incontinent. Ha. Stupid professor thinks he knows something, just because he went to college. And he’s British – didn’t we beat them in soccer?”
A friend just returned from Denmark reporting that many of her friends and former co-workers were so stressed out at work they had health problems.
This spring alone, there have been strikes at Scandinavian Airlines, among bus and train operators in Copenhagen and at one of the biggest daily newspapers.
Racism of the like we haven’t seen since World War II is rumbling through the country. Lots of newspaper ink and political energy is currently spent on whether Muslim politician Asmaa Abdol-Hamid should be allowed to wear her traditional scarf if she’s elected to the parliament.
That traditional scarf is a symbol of female oppression and it represents an evil Muslim empire that’s been trying to eradicate Western civilization for thousands of years, scarf-objectors say.
Clearly, some folks didn’t get the happy memo.
Thursday morning, the good people at ABC’s “Good Morning America” featured a whole segment from Copenhagen – complete with the Little Mermaid, the Queen’s marching band, the newborn princess Henrietta, lots and lots of people on bicycles, and blond Danes drinking beer on sidewalk cafes in the spring afternoon sun.
Hey, by the time they got to sampling the pickled herring in Nyhavn (the part of Copenhagen that looks like Amsterdam) this expatriate was getting so homesick I almost called my mom.
In one of those sweeping broadcast shots that makes every city in the world look like Paris in the springtime, one researcher sitting on a bench in the middle of Copenhagen was asked why he thought Denmark had scored so high on the happiness scale.
“I think it’s because we have very low expectations of life,” he said in an unmistakable Danish accent.
How about that? A nation of perpetual underachievers: If all you expect is a slice of bread and you end up with a fried egg on top of it, we’ll just call it a great day.
White’s more official explanation differs a bit.
He told BBC that people in countries with good health care, a higher gross domestic product per capita and access to education tend to report being happier.
No duh: If you are healthy, wealthy and wise, life can only suck so much, even if your income tax is inching closer and closer to 60 percent. And the cars are smaller than American grocery shopping carts. And gas is 4 bucks a gallon. And the wind blows all the time making it rain sideways a lot, which really tanks when you are biking to work. Yet your health care is free and so is your education and you are guaranteed five weeks of vacation every year.
All of that taken into consideration, life is, as they would say in Denmark, “godt nok.” It’s just good enough.