RE: "Happiness" Isn't All it's Cracked up to Be!
A good post! I don't think anybody I meet fully understand the what happiness is about. My wife and I talk about it as something that happens occasionally - mainly when we look at our sleeping children (when they are awake there is always quarrel and drama). It is almost impossible to think of happiness without including the sorrow. I cry when I am happy (lykkelig). The experience seems to include a horde of dead people.
I looked up the word, lykke, and it seems to derive from an old low German word meaning destiny - same word as luck. But it seems to have gotten another meaning in Danish. We don't use glad and lykke the same way - in English it would just be happiness . So maybe it means that you have to take in the complete life, the destiny, all included, to be lykkelig.
Also I think that apart from cultural divides we all know what it is about. Just like hygge. I have experienced that everywhere in the world.
I'm glad you stopped by to comment @katharsisdrill! I was hoping you would... another perspective from "over there."
It's an interesting experience — even after living in the USA since 1981 — to try to explain certain aspects of another culture. Like hygge. And lykke/lykkelig, as a representation of "happy."
As I read your comment I sense you're explaining "the full range of human experience" as the base stone (grundsten) of many aspects of life. And that's what I try to explain to people about "Danish happiness" when they bring up these surveys and reports.
If you're not defining life in terms of needing very specific things (e.g. "happiness") then you all all things, which then means you aren't as busy describing some things as "bad" or "not-good," and if you're less busy with worry, then you're closer to "lykke" which is just a general sense of satisfaction(?) with existence. It's not a specific thing you can put into a bottle and sell.
It seems perhaps that people in the USA are less "happy" because they are trying to define this thing by very specific concepts: "When I make $80,000 a year I will be happy!"
No. No you won't. Perhaps you will have one of life's puzzle pieces, but you will NOT be "happy."
The English language is oddly limiting, in some ways. I have tried to explain lykke and glæde and even velvære as parts of Danish "happiness." But then it's similar with the idea of "love." There is one word in English, and six in Greek... maybe it all points to what matters most to different cultures?
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Yes, I think you need to bring it all with you to be a whole person, tungsind, melancholy, sadness right beside joy and laughter.
I am not sure about how this is working in US culture, I only know it from a bit of travelling and art. I have meet quite a few (for some reason always New Yorkers) who sport the attitude you describe and who give the impression of something broken, but I have meet many other Americans who are more nuanced. If I should generalise I would say that as a whole people from the US seems naive to me. It might be part of what you describe.