Happiness, Denmark, and Twilight-Sparkle-Style Lifestyle Journalism · 3:17pm Feb 12th, 2017
Among the random gifts that I received at Christmas was a paperback copy of The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, a formerly London-based journalist, who describes her experience of moving to Denmark, and living in the land of Lego. I read it avidly, being a fan of travel books and stories of living in another country. From her writing style, Russell comes across as having a personality somewhere between Pinkie Pie and Rarity, but after reading a few chapters it became clear that she actually has the soul of Twilight Sparkle. The stated objective of the book is to investigate how Denmark manages to achieve the enviable statistic of being the happiest country on Earth. Pretty impressive considering that the tiny Nordic nation has long dark winters and a sky-high cost of living. For comparison, the USA is ranked 13 and the UK 23.
She proceeds to report on her Happiness Studies from her new home in Jutland. Like any Good Student she does not jump to conclusions. She uses random incidents in her daily life as a starting point to investigate some aspect of Danish culture by contacting relevant experts. She ends each chapter with a numbered list of Thing’s I’ve Learned This Month.
Her conclusion? Well, it’s not simple, but it seem Danish-style happiness is achieved through some combination of trusting other people, eating pastries, quality minimalist design, lighting candles, playing around, spending time with family and friends, gender equality, and the support of a particularly impressive social welfare system.
All very good for her and them, but sadly it is proving difficult to export these ideas to more miserable countries. I wonder if Queen Margrethe would consider crowning Helen Russell Princess of Happiness, and giving her and her friends the job of travelling abroad to spread the happiness of Danishness across the world, and sort out all of our happiness problems.
A slightly different perspective:
Depends. Can Queen Margrethe provide a holographic map that detects critical dips in worldwide happiness and indicates who is best suited to resolve them, if not necessarily why?
Friendship [+ Feminism + Social Democracy] is Magic?
Interesting. Might be worth a read.
I feel obligated to note my general distaste for monarchs. Though in most matters on the letter of the law, the Denmark 1953 constitution restricts her more than England's monarch is technically restricted (though in practice they're similar).
However while not invoked in a long time, apparently the blood members of the Danish royal family are only answerable to the reigning monarch or someone she designates. In practice that has meant the monarch pro forma designating whatever legal court would be appropriate (as near I can figure, though it doesn't seem to come up much), but still. The UK has only civil provisions for the royal family, while they could in principle be arrested normally for criminal violations.
...anyway, enough of my republican (in the old-school sense) rantings.
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There's an interesting question. The holographic projection would be the easy bit, but how to do the rest? I guess you could feed in a data stream from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites and analysis it for signs of happiness problems around the world. Then if you fed that into a neural net, or some other AI algorithm, together with a load of personal data on your problem-resolution team members, in principle it could determine the best pair for the job (but probably not why)... But to train your algorithm, you would need a large amount of reference data from previous successful missions... Which is probably not available... There's always a catch.
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And don't forget the pastries.
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Maybe one day I should write a blog post about constitutional monarchy and we can have an interesting discussion about this.
You're right of course, from theoretical point of view, monarchy is a flawed system, and if you were to establish a brand new state somewhere, you would do it as a republic. But where you have an existing constitutional monarchy as part of an old established system, whether you should keep it is a different question. This can only really be decided locally.
I'm enough of a leftie that I have a lot of sympathy with the republican movement, but in England at the moment, from a pragmatic point of view, it's not worth the effort. Getting rid of the monarchy be an enormous political fight, it would create a lot of chaos for years, and it would upset a lot of people for a very small gain. I have a good friend who just love love loves the queen - he's a bit weird but a really nice guy - I would not like to upset him. At the moment, I'd rather reserve my political rants to things like fighting to keep freedom of movement within Europe.
You should also consider that while you may not respect the institution of monarchy, the individual monarchs do (in general) deserve respect as human beings. All things considered, Her Majesty has not done too badly at a pretty difficult job.
I also note that 7 of the top 10 happiest countries are monarchies.
4419776 Oh no I have great respect for Elizabeth II as a person. The happiness of the royals is actually one reason I don't think it should be maintained. I hope I didn't give any indication that I didn't respect them as people. It's the system that I have a problem with.
It's a valid point that it's too much trouble to change right away. I kinda picture a gradual phase-out, though a planned one rather than the ad-hoc phase-out that's been happening over the last 150-ish years for England, 100-ish for most other European monarchies.
Anyway, your idea for how to work a system like that is intriguing, even if it does raise some potential privacy concerns.
4419776
Can I call you comrade?
4478802
Sign me up for the revolution, comrade.
4480207 do you want me to hook you up with local socialist groups in your area?
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They already know me.