Life is never OK. It's never completely
OK. Sometimes, it's just a little less
"not OK."
And I think that used to characterize
Danish mentality. That's as close to
happiness as we can come. I think that's
great and I think it's realistic, but we're
not allowed to have that approach any longer.
Denmark, a small Nordic country of
less than six million people, is pretty
consistently ranked as one of the
happiest countries in the world -- thanks
in part to robust social benefits,
including free university and free
health care and not that much financial
inequality between the richest and the
poorest, which means a lot of Danes don't
have to worry about their basic needs.
We're asked in these international surveys about happiness... I think there's a normative pressure to say,
"I'm happy, I'm satisfied," because if we're not satisfied in this part of the globe,
I mean, who should be satisfied, who should
be happy? But there is a small growing
problem. The number of people and young
people in particular suffering from
quite severe stress is just through the
roof now, and everyone is concerned with
this. For these and all the other
problems facing the country on all
numbers of policy issues,
everyone in Denmark -- the politicians,
the thought leaders, the media, and the
general public -- they're all invited once
a year to the sunshiny island called
Bornholm in the middle of the Baltic Sea
to debate, and drink, and sing.
It's here that I met Svend Brinkmann. Svend became
very popular in Denmark after he
published his self-help book. My book is
about how to avoid developing as a
person. Here is some of Svend's advice:
focus on the negative in your life; stop
trying to "find yourself"; and practice saying
"no" five times a day. In essence, he wants
people to resist that pressure to
improve yourself and to resist the need
to always be positive about things, which
American psychologists really started
pushing in the late 1990s and has since
seeped into life and work life not just
in America but all over the world. And
that has sort of hit Denmark, this whole
idea of self-improvement, 
self-optimization in the last 10 or 15 years.
Now, life has to be not just OK, but
super OK all the time. And if we don't
have these feelings of happiness and
positivity, well, there must be something
wrong with me. Why am I not happy? I live
in a rich country, I couldn't think of
anywhere else that I would rather live,
so I have to be happy. Why am I not happy?
There's something wrong with me. And the
answer, of course, is no. These new reports
of stress and anxiety in Denmark, Svend
thinks those are linked to a new focus
on individual improvement. Everything we
do is about performing. You should be the
best version of yourself. He sees it as
something that's changing work life in
Denmark as well. If you talk to your
manager for performance and development
reviews, you cannot really say, "Well, I'm
happy now. I'm good enough now. I don't
really want to change and develop." And,
you know, it's even more forbidden to say,
"In three years' time, I hope I can be able
to go back to how it was two years ago,
when I performed as a slightly lower
level or something." You cannot. So you're
forced to develop and improve with this
whole positive attitude.
It wasn't always like that in Denmark. Now
we, we think that we're supposed to be
happy and positive all the time, and
maybe, paradoxically, it makes us miserable.
I think it's important for a human being
to feel that it's OK
also just to be, I don't know, gray, or you
know, blue, and you had thought... I mean,
there's no problem with that. That's also life.
