Denmark: The World's Happiest Country?
by John Lawrence
In a National Geographic survey, Denmark ranked as the world's happiest country. It's a combination of several factors including the feeling that their country cares for them. They can never sink too low because their country will always help them if they are willing to help themselves. They can truly pursue their passion in life because they are set free from worrying about the need to just survive. They have free health care, free education up to and including the university level and parental leave at full pay for a year after every child is born. This can be shared between the two parents including gay and lesbian parents.
There are 5 criteria that the survey used to rate happiness: financial, social, purpose, physical and community. The thought is that you can't be really happy if your physical body is out of whack. And that comes down to not just treating illness as what "health care" in the US consists of. It means how active physically you are. Danes and other Europeans do a lot of walking as well as participate in other physical activities so they have a more robust personal power plant.
The private and the public are in a healthy balance. There's not the intense conflict between the two spheres as you find in the US. There's a feeling that "We're all in this together. An American anthropologist, Jonathan Schwartz, based in Copenhagen said, "Danish happiness is closely tied to their notion of tryghed, the snuggled, tucked-in feeling that begins with a mother's love and extends to the relationship Danes have with their government."
Engaging work and rewarding play are more in balance. Danes get 4 weeks of vacation each year. They feel free to work in a job that is personally rewarding instead of one that represents a daily grind to eke out a living. "The Danes seem more aware of the total needs of a person than most other places," said a psychologist at Claremont Graduate University in California. In other words they are more in tune with life. Maybe it's because they don't devote half their national budget to militarism as we do in the US. The US, assuming for itself the role of world policeman, has been a colossal failure resulting in the fact that there are 65 million refugees in the world.
Perhaps the world's refugees should take up a chant #Refugees' Lives Matter similar to #Black Lives Matter. Their plight at the hands of the US military is similar to the plight of black people at the hands of US police forces.
