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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

‘Denmark is no longer the country I loved’

If you complain, you will promptly be told that Denmark is the world’s happiest and best country. Despite its record for prescription pills and suicide.

Published: 12 January 2016 16:03 CET
'Denmark is no longer the country I loved'
The weather we have to accept but what about the current dreary state of affairs in Denmark? Photo: Colourbox
Competent immigrants are expelled while violent men like Gimi Levacovic get millions from the state. 
 
The elderly lie around in diapers in nursing homes because we can’t afford the needed staffing. But we have the money to spend billions each year to subsidize the media. 
 
There is a mass migration from south to north that we are powerless to do anything about. There is massive pressure – but no help – for the weakest people in areas most affected by the refugee crisis. 
 
The left-wing is mad about the prospect of families in rural areas maybe being able to afford a car large enough for the whole family. 
 
Growth in Denmark is dead as a doornail. We do everything in our power to destroy our own competitiveness yet still act amazed when we succeed. 
 
Some 100,000 eastern Europeans take care of tasks that the Danes can’t be bothered to do. At the same time, there are 800,000 Danes of working age between 18 and 65 that are dependent on public benefits. 
 
There are 800,000 employees in the public sector. The same number of people live off of the system. There are 1.2 million retirees. But there are only 1.6 million people in the private sector to pay for it all. 
 
Public job activation programmes cost somewhere between 15 and 30 billion kroner a year, but create no jobs. 
 
Doctors and nurses use up to half of their time recording and reporting information – that hardly gets used. In return, there are waiting lists for treatment and patients sleeping in the hallways.
 
The City of Copenhagen has a communications staff of several hundred, while there are waiting lists for daycare institutions and a shortage of teachers. 
 
The border with Sweden is closed and we are paying for the border controls. The border with Germany must also be checked, and we pay for that too. That heralded Danish business acumen is in full swing. 
 
We have just passed the most expensive budget of all time. It will be paid by the world’s highest tax burden. Still, we have to borrow 60 billion kroner from abroad and take from retirees’ pension in order to get the budget to work. 
 
If one complains, you will be immediately told that Denmark is the world’s happiest and best country. Even though 12 percent of the adult population pops prescription pills and the suicide rate is among the world’s highest. 
 
A nearly unanimous parliament adopts an “energy reform” that costs residents an additional eight billion kroner in taxes each year. It doesn’t create any real CO2 reduction, but all those windmills sure do look nice. 
 
The labour union 3F protects something or somebody (it’s a little unclear what or whom) by blockading businesses and restaurants with the result that jobs disappear abroad. Many praise their exemplary effort. 
 
Parliament approves a “freedom from information law” so residents can no longer have full insight into the political process. Agencies and ministries use the law to cover up their mistakes and blunders. 
 
Tax agency Skat wastes four billion kroner on an electronic collection system which is incredibly poorly-planned and purchased. A smart business man scams them for nine billion kroner with a bunch of photocopies. No one is held accountable and in the meantime, the agency goes after the self-employed and small businesses. 
 
Rail company DSB wastes countless millions on the IC4 train, the Rejsekort, operating in Sweden and more. Despite the massive government subsidies, it is more expensive to take the train than to fly. And the trains don’t even run on time. 
 
One man is fined for cleaning his gutter. Another because the rocks around his campfire aren’t facing the right direction. A third is made to tear down his shed because it is one square metre too big. 
 
Skat and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) admit at approximately the same time that they have illegally exchanged sensitive information for more than ten years. The justice minister refuses to do anything about it and uses the “freedom from information law” to sweep the whole mess under the rug. 
 
Property taxes have exploded. Skat admits that upwards of 85 percent of its property evaluations are illegally high and thus has charged way too much in tax. But it refuses to pay the money back. Parliament approves a special law so that property owners can neither complain nor take Skat to court for compensation. 
 
The Roskilde Festival succeeded in expropriating a local farmer’s land because festival-goers need it to camp. The man is given a compensation amounting to roughly one fourth of the land’s market value. 
 
Ekstra Bladet can tell us that Prince Henrik’s car was parked outside of a swinger’s club while he was at the movies, yet the Danish press waited five days to bring the story of the systematic rapes and assaults in Cologne. 
 
Police tell the media that they no longer bother investigating break-ins in which less than 10,000 kroner is stolen. That Denmark is the at the very top of the EU when it comes to burglaries doesn’t seem to worry them. 
 
Speeding cameras are systematically placed where they will give the best pay-out to the public purse instead of where they would best strengthen road safety. 
 
For nearly the tenth year running, Copenhagen is under construction and dug up from end to end. 
 
Violence and social control are a part of daily life in many immigrant communities. We talk about it. But we don’t do anything. 
 
Police say that they cannot respond to all reports but at the same time if you take matters into your own hands, then you will go to prison. 
 
Immigrant boys beat a young couple beyond recognition with bicycle chains. Their punishment of two months in jail was finished before the couple had healed and there was no compensation. 
 
A foreigner throws his girlfriend from a balcony and gets a job on TV with celebrity chef Claus Meyer. The girlfriend survives but is disfigured and has severe psychological trauma. She gets no help. 
 
And I could continue to go on and on and on. 
 
Why can’t we help each other to get things to work? 
 
I grieve. Denmark is no longer the country I loved when I was a young man. 
 
Søren Kenner is an entrepreneur and a contributor to Folkets Avis, where this was originally published. It has been translated and republished with the author's permission. You can follow the author on Twitter at @sorenkenner. 

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Down with Danish hygge – Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

Hygge, the Danish art of getting cosy, has taken the world by storm. But the Swedish equivalent is refreshingly different, says David Crouch 

Published: 20 December 2022 08:41 CET
Updated: 6 August 2023 11:03 CEST
OPINION: Down with Danish hygge - Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

It is around seven years since the Danish word hygge entered many of our languages. Hygge, pronounced hue-guh and generally translated as the art of cosiness, exploded almost overnight to become a global lifestyle phenomenon.

Hygge dovetailed with mindfulness and fed into other popular trends such as healthy eating, and even adult colouring books. “The Little Book of Hygge” became a publishing sensation and has been translated into 15 languages. It was swiftly followed by a second book from its author, “My Hygge Home”, one of dozens on the market. 

There is nothing wrong with new ways to relax, and certainly no harm in identifying them with Scandinavia. But as a guide to living your life, there are some problems with hygge. 

First, the original meaning of the word is too broad and subtle to enable a clear grasp of the concept among non-Danes. This probably helps to explain its appeal – hygge is an empty bottle into which you can pour whatever liquid you like.

Patrick Kingsley, who wrote a book about Denmark several years before the hygge hype, was “surprised to hear people describe all sorts of things” as hygge. Danes, he said, would use the word when talking about a bicycle, a table, or even an afternoon stroll. 

So it is hardly surprising that, outside Denmark, hygge is applied rather indiscriminately. Last week the New York Times devoted an entire article to achieving hygge while riding the city’s subway, of all places. “A train, after all, is basically a large sled that travels underground, in the dark,” it said, trying too hard to find a hint of Nordic-ness on the overcrowded railway.

READ ALSO: Danish word of the day – hyggeracisme

Hygge has become an exotic and mysterious word to describe more or less anything you want. It is as if someone decided that the English word “nice” had a magical meaning that contained the secret to true happiness, and then the whole non-English speaking world made great efforts to achieve the perfect feeling of “nice”. 

A second problem with hygge is that, in Denmark itself, it seems to operate like a badge of Danishness that can only be enjoyed by Danes themselves – a kind of cultural border that outsiders cannot cross. You can walk down a Danish street in the dark, one journalist was told, look through the windows and spot who is Danish and who is foreign just by whether their lighting is hygge or not.

When writer Helen Russell spent a year in Denmark, she was intrigued by hygge and asked a lifestyle coach about it. “It’s hard to explain, it’s just something that all Danes know about,” she was told. How could an immigrant to Denmark get properly hygge, Russell asked? “You can’t. It’s impossible,” was the unhelpful reply. It can’t be a coincidence that the far-right Danish Peoples Party has put a clear emphasis on hygge, as if immigration is a threat to hygge and therefore to Danish-ness itself. 

READ ALSO: It’s official – Hygge is now an English word

Outside Denmark, this exclusivity has taken on another aspect: where are all the children? Where amid the hygge hype are the bits of lego on the floor, the mess of discarded clothes, toys and half-eaten food, the bleeping iPads and noisy TVs? “Hygge is about a charmed existence in which children are sinisterly absent,” noted the design critic for the Financial Times. It’s as if the Pied Piper of hygge has spirited them away so you can get truly cosy. 

But there is a bigger problem with hygge. It is largely an invention, the work of some clever marketing executives. After spotting a feature about hygge on the BBC website, two of London’s biggest publishers realised this was “a perfect distillation of popular lifestyle obsessions”. They set out to find people who could write books for them on the subject, and so two bestsellers were born, spawning a host of imitations. 

Sweden has a different word that means roughly the same thing: mys (the noun) and mysig (the adjective). There have even been some half-hearted attempts to sell mys to a foreign audience in the same way as hygge. But the real meaning of mys in Swedish society is rather different, it seems to me. The reason for this, I think, is that mys has become so firmly identified with Friday nights, or fredagsmys – the “Friday cosy”. 

Fredagsmys is a collective sigh of relief that the working / school week is over, and now it is time for the whole family to come together in front of some trashy TV with a plate of easy finger-food. The word first appeared in the 1990s, entered the dictionary in 2006, and became a semi-official national anthem three years later with this joyous ad for potato crisps:

In this portrayal, mys is radically different to hygge. It is a celebration of the ordinary, witty and multi-cultural, featuring green-haired goths and a mixed-race family with small children. Food is central to fredagsmys, and what is the typical food of choice? Mexican, of course! Not a herring in sight.

Why Mexican? It seems nobody is really sure, but tacofredag now has roots in Swedish society. Tacos, tortillas, and all the accompanying spices and sauces take up a whole aisle of the typical Swedish supermarket. Swedes are accustomed to eating bread with various bits and pieces on top, according to a specialist in Swedish food culture, while the Swedish tradition of smörgåsbord (open sandwiches) makes a buffet meal seem natural. The fussiness of tacos is even reminiscent of a kräftskiva crayfish party.

There is no cultural exclusivity here. On the contrary, fredagsmys food could equally be Italian, North American, Middle-Eastern, British or French. And children are absolutely central to a good Friday cosy. 

With Swedish mys, everybody is welcome. Get cosy and relax, but do it by mixing and getting messy, rather than retreating into pure, perfect, rarified isolation. There is a time and a place for hygge. But the Swedish version is more real, more fun, and more inclusive.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

 
 
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