Romanticizing Scandinavians’ way of life is becoming a popular pastime. Sweden has the best parental leave policy in the world. Finland’s education system magically mixes low pressure and high achievement. And the Danes, the happiest people in the world, have higgle. [...]
“Hygge practices are, broadly, things that we do that our ancestors would recognise; besides lighting fires, eating, drinking, eating cake and drinking things that are hot,” she writes. “Yet there is certainly a Danish specificity in the prominence of pyromania, and principles crop up repeatedly that are highly specific to the Scandinavian climate.”
Williams looks at a few books on the hygge list, including The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking, which notes some of the downsides of hygge, namely that it is based on small groups which can be pretty exclusionary. That suggests that its comforting nature may have as much as anything to do with being in a tight-knit, familiar group of friends or family, and that the fire, hot cocoa, and artfully woven woollen blankets are more the trappings of hygge than the source of it. [...]
Perhaps, then, the craze for hygge is just a manifestation of the desire to be more connected. Westerners generally live in less cohesive communities than they did a few decades ago, and technology dominates their waking hours, which is both isolating and overwhelming.
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