The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

But I am afraid to say that over the years I have come to detest hygge somewhat. It wasn’t the cheap, fizzy beer (how did they ever have the nerve to claim it was “probably the best”? It’s like claiming Wonder Bread is the best bread), the curried herring, or the communal singing in which the Danes inevitably indulge when more than two of them gather together and which can drag out a formal Danish dinner to interminable lengths, that ultimately turned me against hygge; it was more hygge’s tyrannical, relentless drive toward middle-ground consensus; its insistence on the avoidance of any potentially controversial topics of conversation; its need to keep things light and breezy—the whole comfortable, self-congratulatory, petit bourgeois smugness of it all.