“When people hygge, they engage in a mutual sheltering of each other from the pressures of competition and social evaluation.” In this way hygge can seem like self-administered social gagging, characterized more by a self-satisfied sense of its own exclusivity than notions of shared conviviality. Linnet also wrote that hygge “acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge.” The inference here is that only Danes really know how to have a properly hyggelig time;
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