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Thomas Colson
Meik Wiking
And there is good reason to listen to him - he has become a leading expert on the matter since he founded The Happiness Research Institute of Copenhagen, a think tank which explores global trends of life satisfaction.
Appropriately enough, Wiking hails from Denmark, the happiest country in the world. He believes that Danes consistently top happiness rankings because of one thing - hygge (pronounced hoo-gah), the subject of his new book.
As Wiking says, pronouncing it is the easy part. Explaining it is more difficult. Roughly, it means "cosiness," but it goes much further than that.
"Hygge has been called everything from 'the art of creating intimacy', 'cosiness of the soul,' and 'the absence of annoyance' to 'taking pleasure in the presence of soothing things,'" Wiking writes. People associate hygge with candlelight, hot chocolate, and log fires - but is there more to it?
Business Insider met Wiking in London to hear more about his newly-released "Little Book of Hygge," which views happiness like an economy.
Business Insider's Thomas Colson: I would like to hear a little about your background. How did you come to set up the Happiness Research Institute?
Meik Wiking: I was working for a think tank in Copenhagen in a division that worked on sustainability. I was with them for seven years. But then two things happened. Firstly, I noticed how much was happening globally with regard to happiness. The UN passed a resolution on happiness in 2011, and the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global policy forum], quite a conservative organisation, started to use life satisfaction as one of the indicators of social progress.
World Happiness Report
World happiness rankings
People like the [former British prime minister] David Cameron were looking at incorporating life satisfaction as a way of measuring progress. And I just thought, there's really a lot happening globally with happiness research. There should be somebody in Denmark trying to pool all this knowledge, because we're doing quite well in happiness. And then I thought - maybe I should do that.
At the same time my mentor at work - a good colleague and personal friend - became very ill and died at the age of 49. My own mother also died when she was 49. At that time I was 33, and I guess I was sort of demotivated in my job. And if I had fifteen years left, and you're only going to make it to 49, why not create something that could be really exciting?
Two months afterwards I had quit, and then I established the Happiness Institute a month or two afterwards.
TC: How does the methodology that goes into happiness research differ from conventional science?
MW: To explain this, I like to use the analogy of the economy. When we talk about that, we can break it down into different components. We can talk about unemployment, inflation, growth, GDP per capita. That gives different information about how, for example, the British economy is doing. We need to be able to do the same thing when it comes to happiness.
The OECD are trying to create standards to measure it: they basically ask organisations to break life satisfaction into three components. All these are based on direct assessment. Firstly, they would ask you or me how happy we feel or how satisfied we are with our lives in general. Secondly, they say you should measure emotions or moods on an everyday basis, both positive and negative ones - happiness, sadness, loneliness, depression, joy, anger, love.
When we talk about the economy we can break it down into different components: unemployment, inflation, growth. We need to do the same thing with to happiness.
We can all see that there is an strong correlation between those two dimensions. If you have a lot of positive emotions - even when they are a lot more volatile - you also report a lot higher levels of life satisfaction.
The third dimension which is used in the surveys is whether people have a sense of purpose. And that is based on Aristotle's perception of happiness, about having a meaningful life. So those are the three dimensions we always measure.
Having those three things gives me a better impression of how someone is doing than just one, and they also tell me different things. And you can then see how those different factors influence those three dimensions.
That's especially useful if we follow people over time, seeing and asking a given person every year - how happy are you, measuring their sense of purpose. I see when changes happen over a lifetime. If that person doubles their income, if they moves jobs, if they get sick, if they get married, what happens with the different happiness levels when these things happen. That is how we approach it.
TC: And where did hygge fit into it? Was that an afterthought, or a part of your research?
MW: That was an afterthought. One of the first things I tried to explore in this field was why Denmark does well in the happiness rankings. And we did a report on that a few years ago and one of the main explanations is that of the welfare state - social security, universal healthcare, and a universal pension.
The trouble with that explanation, though, is that it does not explain why Denmark does better than the other Nordic countries. Now the other Nordic countries also do well in the happiness rankings, all Nordic countries are always in the top ten.
And that's the Nordic welfare model. But why should Denmark do a little bit better than Norway, Finland and Sweden? They have the same welfare model. And then we took a look at hygge, which is something that is uniquely Danish, and we decided that could be the explanation for why Denmark does better than Sweden or Norway. So that's how it came about.
TC: How come Denmark's intake of antidepressants is higher than most countries given that it is also ranked as the happiest country in the world?
MW: It's 40% higher than the OECD average. It's ranked below Iceland, Australia, the
But what a lot of people miss is who's at the bottom of the list. The countries at the bottom of the list are Eastern European countries where they have a lot of people who are depressed. They have some of the highest suicide rates in the world. The trouble is, they have people who are depressed but they're not getting treatment.
If you just look at who's at the top of the list it looks like a bad story but the real story is, these countries recognise mental illness and try to treat it in some way. Then you should discuss, is this the right form of treatment? But being a society that acknowledges that people suffer from mental illnesses, and that we should try and do something about them? I think that's a good thing. A lot of people miss that - they just think it's a paradox.
TC: Do you believe that hygge is something that can be exported to other countries? As you say, it's so ingrained in Danish culture, and it's all very well buying candles and having friends for dinner, but presumably you'd be the first to say that's only part of hygge.
MW: I think you already are bringing it over! But you're right - the candles are perhaps more a manifestation of the hygge culture than they are a driver of it. I think it originates from something more fundamental, something about togetherness, equality, and community.
Candles are a manifestation of hygge culture rather than a driver of it. I think it originates from something more fundamental: togetherness, equality, and community.
And of course there's the question of the chicken and the egg - does hygge culture come first, or does community and togetherness? I think they're mutually reinforcing.
I think the first step is just to start the conversation around hygge and ask, what is everyday happiness? How can we get to that? And we can start to talk about simple living, togetherness, and relationships.
TC: Do you think people are starting to adjust the way they find happiness?
MW: I think more and more people - more and more countries - are coming to a point where we are questioning the way of measuring happiness.
I think people are getting to the realisation that we have decoupled wealth and wellbeing, and have failed to convert wealth into wellbeing - at a country level, and also very much at an individual level. I see that a lot with South East Asian countries. South Korea is the country I get most visits from, because they've had tremendous growth and tremendous wealth increase but are really struggling with converting that into quality of life.
So I think it's also part of that realisation for people and for countries that what we have been driving after and for is not necessarily bringing us additional quality of life. I'm not saying there isn't a correlation between wealth and wellbeing - there definitely is at the lower level scale. But I think at the wealth level that the UK or Denmark has achieved, the effects of wealth on wellbeing have been lost.
TC: So is the world getting happier?
MW: The world is getting happier, if you look at the "World Happiness Report." For example South America is progressing, there are some pockets where it's going in one direction but overall from a global point of view but I think the UK, Denmark, USA, have been steady or even declining in the past decade.
TC: Do your travels inspire you to pursue research projects?
MW: I'm interested in the way we design cities, and how that affects our happiness. When it comes to the factors that affect our happiness, we can look at them in three different categories:
1. There are some things we're not in control of. We're born more or less happy or unhappy, and we can not change that. Genetics matter.
2. There are some factors - our behaviour, lifestyle choices, we do have control over.
3. Then, there is an area where we're only a little in control of policies we live under - the way cities are designed, for example. We have some say in that but not a lot.
So we're trying to look at the policy at city-level. Here's an example: walking around in Kuala Lumpur I was staying 200 metres from the botanical gardens and I thought I'd go over there and have a look. And I had to give up because I couldn't go over there because there's no good infrastructure for cyclists or pedestrians. That would not happen in London, that would not happen in Copenhagen.
So I think that will be a field for us - the way we design our cities, how does that affect our quality of life.
TC: How would you measure the ultimate success of your institute?
MW: Our ultimate aim is to provide a body of scientific knowledge that will enable us to increase quality of life for people, and to take that knowledge and convey it into recommendations for policy-makers.
Right now, for example, we're working with a foundation in Denmark where we are looking at how different initiatives improve quality of life for 16 to 24-year-olds. So we ask, is there a strong correlation between life satisfaction and self-esteem, or between life satisfaction and relationships?
Each year this institution gives away twelve million pounds, and a lot of the time that's based on "I think this works" or, "this sounds like a nice project". We would like to add the data into that equation, establishing what initiatives would work better than others. If we could just make the way the money is spent ten percent more efficient, in terms of investing in quality of life, that will go a long way. So that's our ambition in the end.