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

by Michael Booth

This might well be another of the keys to the Danes’ happiness—and I suspect this applies to any kind of long-term happiness. Proper, deep, enduring joy usually requires a remarkable facility for denial, something which the Danes have in spades. I do not, of course, mean self-denial here. As we can conclude from their alcohol, tobacco, hash, and sugar intake, the Danes deny themselves few pleasures. I am talking, for instance, about their denial of what it costs to be Danish—the literal cost, via their taxes and the cost of goods in their shops but also the spiritual costs in terms of their relative lack of ambition and dynamism, the denial of those sometimes necessary conflicts, and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism denied them by Jante Law and hygge.