From link:
Y’all should. Copenhagen is awesome. One of my favorite cities.
Seems a bit unfair to criticize Denmark for not being in the top ten of European tourist attractions, though. High stakes, much? How come no one seems particularly interested in visiting Estonia? Lithuania? Belgium? Romania? Bulgaria? Georgia? Lithuania? Slovakia? Switzerland (much)?
Maybe because not every corner of Europe is Paris, London or Berlin? Sorry about that, I guess. (And speaking of Berlin, who ever goes on holiday in Germany, outside of Berlin? Unless you have an unhealthy obsession with beer and Lederhosen, I suppose.)
That said: I’m speaking as a Norwegian here, not a Dane, but it is a bit of a relief to see someone try to poke a hole in the Scandinavian happiness facade, for once. I have absolutely no doubt that the self-reported happiness levels are way higher than the real figures. In Norway, at least, I think there is, well, maybe not so much a culture where it’s “shameful to be unhappy”, as a persistent message being put out from one’s surroundings that we’re the happiest people on Earth, so if you don’t feel happy, you’re clearly just wrong. After a while you don’t trust your own emotions anymore. In Norway, you’ll see newspaper headlines like “Why we’re all so happy in this country!”, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the usual fare elsewhere. Everyone is walking around looking sideways at everyone else, and wondering if the elephant in the room is all in their heads. It feels like a kind of self-perpetuating Newspeak sometimes. Ask Norwegians how happy they are, and they’ll tell you that they’re maxing out the scale, because that is what everyone is telling everyone else. If everyone in a country have decided that the sky is green, at some point you’ll get wary about putting “blue” on a survey. We have all these reasons to be happy, because we live in the bestest country in the world! If you aren’t walking around fulfilled to the max and with a constant grin on your face, you must be an ungrateful brat. And who wants to be an ungrateful brat?
Come to think of it, the story about the the Emperor’s new clothes was written by a Dane. Maybe that’s not a coincidence.
'Cause let’s get real: Scandinavians aren’t happy all the time. We’re human. We have problems, too. We have to get up and go to work in the morning, same as everyone else. We struggle with life, same as everyone else. We have problems with drugs and alcohol, with relationships and family, with getting through the day without going mental in the process, same as everyone else. And safety nets or not, “socialist utopia” or not, it’s entirely possible to fall through the cracks and faceplant pretty good here, too, same as everywhere else.
Fellow Scandinavians: It’s OK. If you’re not feeling like a million bucks all the time, you can say so. At least once in a while.
(too many, way too many). Or to those writers whose travels to exotic places left them shocked and disturbed that people Elsewhere had Strange Customs (hi, Washington Irving!).