The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well


by Meik Wiking  (2016)

The author of this book attributes the fact that the Danes regularly top world happiness charts to the fact that they take Hygge or Danish cosiness of the soul seriously in many areas of life.  It is not just that cosy feeling when you sit around a roaring fire with friends and candles as a storm rages outside, you can apply hygge to meals, Christmas, skiing, pretty much any social occasion.  

Of course, the Danes also do have generous government support, pretty reasonable GDP, a generally trusting population, and a great work/life balance.  These things probably help, but hygge does sound like a lovely idea and I've gone out and bought candles as a result.

Rating 6/10




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Only Skill that Matters

Image
By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...
Read more

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Image
by Jamil Zaki (2019) This is a clarion call for maximisation of the very best of human qualities, and given the increasing alienation, unhappiness and general antipathy that ail us, along with the global problems we face, this call doesn't come a moment too soon. It is an essential read - important for everyone - parents, policy makers and leaders of all sorts. Rating 10/10. 
Read more

The Marshmallow Test: Understanding self-control and how to master it

Image
by Walter Mischel (2015) It's hard to take Mischel's  argument  for nurture terribly seriously immediately after reading Plomin's  "Blueprint" .  It isn't as if Plomin's  book isn't flawed , but it nonetheless did make a pretty convincing case that we are largely determined by our genes.   Mischel, on the other hand, whilst also giving a nod to the importance of genetic determinism, remains far more optimistic than Plomin that we can choose to alter ourselves in a way that can change outcomes in a meaningful sort of a way.  He argues that it doesn't all come down to whether we were able to resist the marshmallow aged three and a half.  According to him, we can learn optimism, a growth mindset and various  other strategies for resisting temptation.  The problem is that the marshmallow test and their ilk, including Dweck's Growth Mindset theory have been subject to the replication problem from which it seems possible to conc...
Read more