The Year of Living Danishly Read Free

in’ and do more, it looked like you could pretty much lean any way you fancied in Denmark and still do OK. Oh, and women weren’t handed sticks to beat themselves with if they weren’t ‘having it all’. This, I decided, was refreshing.
    Whereas in the US and the UK we’d fought for more money at work, Scandinavians had fought for more time – for family leave, leisure and a decent work-life balance. Denmark was regularly cited as the country with the shortest working week for employees, and the latest figures showed that Danes only worked an average of 34 hours a week (according to Statistic Denmark). By comparison, the Office of National Statistics found that Brits put in an average of 42.7 hours a week. Instead of labouring around the clock and using the extra earnings to outsource other areas of life – from cooking to cleaning, gardening, even waxing – Danes seemed to adopt a DIY approach.
    Denmark was also the holder of a number of world records – from having the world’s best restaurant, in Copenhagen’s Noma, to being the most trusting nation and having the lowest tolerance for hierarchy. But it was the biggie that fascinated me: our potential new home was officially the happiest country on earth . The UN World Happiness Report put this down to a large gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, high life expectancy, a lack of corruption, a heightened sense of social support, freedom to make life choices and a culture of generosity. Scandinavian neighbours Norway and Sweden nuzzled alongside at the top of the happy-nation list, but it was Denmark that stood out. The country also topped the UK Office of National Statistics’ list of the world’s happiest nations and the European Commission’s well-being and happiness index – a position it had held onto for 40 years in a row. Suddenly, things had taken a turn for the interesting.
    â€˜Happy’ is the holy grail of the lifestyle journalist. Every feature I’d ever written was, in some way, connected to the pursuit of this elusive goal. And ever since defacing my army surplus bag with the lyrics to the REM song in the early 1990s, I’d longed to be one of those shiny, happy people (OK, so I missed the ironic comment on communist propaganda, but I was only twelve at the time).
    Happy folk, I knew, were proven to earn more, be healthier, hang on to relationships for longer and even smell better. Everyone wanted to be happier, didn’t they? We certainly spent enough time and money trying to be. At the time of researching, the self-help industry was worth $11 billion in the US and had earned UK publishers £60 million over the last five years. Rates of antidepressant use had increased by 400 per cent in the last fifteen years and were now the third most-prescribed type of medication worldwide (after cholesterol pills and painkillers). Even those lucky few who’d never so much as sniffed an SSRI or picked up a book promising to boost their mood had probably used food, booze, caffeine or a credit card to bring on a buzz.
    But what if happiness isn’t something you can shop for? I could almost feel the gods of lifestyle magazines preparing to strike me down as I contemplated this shocking thought. What if happiness is something more like a process, to be worked on? Something you train the mind and body into? Something Danes just have licked?
    One of the benefits of being a journalist is that I get to be nosy for a living. I can call up all manner of interesting people under the pretext of ‘research’, with the perfect excuse to ask probing questions. So when I came across Denmark’s ‘happiness economist’ Christian Bjørnskov, I got in touch.
    He confirmed my suspicions that our Nordic neighbours don’t go in for solace via spending (thus ruling out 90 per cent of my usual coping strategies).
    â€˜Danes don’t believe that buying more stuff brings you