Posted on 15 Oct, 2008 -
The happiest country in the world
In 2006, the country of Denmark ranked first out of 178 countries on the University of Leicester’s Map of Happiness - compared to woebegone Britain in a miserable 41st place. Amazingly, in fact, the Danes have come top in every such European survey for the past 30 years.
So why are they so happy? The answers, I believe, could also offer a happy flip side for our own current credit crunch predicament.
The first reason for their happiness that researchers have discovered, is that they have a low expectation of their immediate future. While always willing to say that they are very content right now, they are also consistently hesitant to believe that this will last.
Has too much optimism for the future been our downfall?
Quite an opposite outlook, in fact, to the positive thinking optimism that Barbara Ehrenreich blamed for our current financial crisis in an article in The New York Times last week. Gripped by a somewhat maniacal positive thinking/Law of Attraction belief that if I wish for great things enough I will get them, the whole of America has refused to admit that the future for everyone cannot always be richer and wealthier. In England too, our government and banking system together have bent the system until it snapped in an attempt to create a non-stop ‘better future’ for everyone.
But does always believing that greater wealth, greater happiness and better schools lie just around the corner actually make a good recipe for happiness? Does it not rather create discontent with the present and a habit of feeling that everything we have right now is not good enough: right from the dilapidated state of our sock drawer, through to the state services we receive and the salary we earn?
“A freedom from the compulsion to seek superiority”
Another interesting reason given for why Danes are so much happier is their egalitarian and public-spirited outlook. In an article in Prospect magazine, recently, a British ex-pat living in Denmark talked proudly of the “high value placed on solidarity and community and a freedom from the compulsion to seek superiority.”
People in Denmark, do not, Sally Laird says, worry about trying to get their kids into the best schools in order to procure them a ‘better’ education and one-upmanship. The citizens actively believe in fairness and the equality of all.
Rather than aspiring to ‘better lives’, is it time, perhaps, to become ‘better people’?
So how can we make changes in our own attitudes and behaviours, I wondered, to try and mimic the conditions that create such high levels of contentment in Denmark?
* By discovering, perhaps, the joy of being happy to be just ‘ordinary’ - rather than seeking whatever is our own personal form of superiority over others. “Happiness,” said Iris Murdoch, “is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness - being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”
* By looking for all the positive things in our life right now. By appreciating that you have a roof over your head rather than worrying about the moss on it. By appreciating that we have a whole drawer full of warm socks rather than bemoaning the fact that they’re a little bit tatty.
* By getting ourselves out of the habit of believing that we will be wealthier in the future. Believing that we will have greater wealth soon can breed discontent with our current levels, an over-reliance on credit and a constant state of disappointment.
* By concentrating our efforts on increasing the small pleasures in life that do not rely on financial wealth or materialism. A bowl of homemade parsnip soup at home with a candle and Beethoven could be a far richer experience than a £7 lasagne at the Marks and Spencers cafe. Snuggling up in bed together with the heating off may be better for our relationship than a night in front of the telly worrying about the cost of heating in December.
* And by becoming, perhaps, more public-spirited. “What can I do to help people less fortunate than me?” is a healthier state of mind than “What can I do to make myself wealthier or better than others?”
Is there really any need for all this rampant pessimism?
It is also worth bearing in mind, I believe, that there is a middle ground between the kind of optimism for the future that has got us in this state - and the crazed pessimism that is gripping our nation today.
Not, of course, that being REALISTIC has ever been that popular. We would much rather submit ourselves to the high-wire swings between our lottery-winning dreams and jobless, poverty-stricken fears than take the sensible route of realising that we will probably be ‘alright’.
“I once” said Henry David Thoreau, “had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”
Wishing you a reasonable week full of ordinary pleasures.
