Inside Out | What is the secret formula to top the world happiness ranking? Don’t worry, be hygge
It seems, if you want to be happy, you should live in an expensive country – or at least that is what is suggested in the coincidental release this week of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2018 Worldwide Cost of Living Index, and the United Nations’ World Happiness Report.
Happiness also seems to concentrate in cold, dark, wet countries in northern Europe – a puzzle I will never understand, having spent much of my early life escaping, or dreaming of how to escape, those drab dark monochrome days that run every January to March.
Yet the UN is emphatic: Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland arm-wrestle for the top four happiest places in the world, with Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden also padding most of the top 10. This year, Finland popped up into top place, but these five Scandinavian neighbours are all very close. The UN says that even their immigrant communities are unusually happy. It seems weird that so many people should be so happy paying such high taxes, and shivering in a semi-permanent state of darkness for six months of the year.
True, Singapore seems to be the world’s most expensive city, with Hong Kong (4th) and Seoul (7th) close behind, none of which seem to show any particular sense of happiness, but the convergence in Europe of both high costs and happiness takes some explaining.
Our Danish friends turn quickly and mystically to their sense of “hygge” – pronounced hue-guh, by the way, and apparently stolen from a Norwegian word for “well-being” or “mental cosiness”, and closely linked to Sweden’s idea of “iagom”, or moderate living.