121–130 of 168 posts
I wonder if the lack of ethnic diversity in the "happier" countries is a contributing factor: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...
Other people have mentioned Japan, but you could look at basically any eastern european state to see lots of ethnically pure, yet miserable populations. EDIT: those countries are getting better, but still...
I am Norwegian and wonder how much of this is cultural. Most people here know that the rest of the world has much lower living standards. So for many it is perhaps rude or shameful to claim to be unhappy or dissatisfied. I know it says "subjective happiness" in the report, but I still suspect it might be an influence.
1) Happiness is not as subjective as people think. Research suggest that what people state about their own happiness correlates very well with how friends and colleagues would describe a person as. 2) Having lived abroad extensively and traveled around many places keenly trying to observe these things I'd say Norwegian happiness is real. But we have a tendency in Norway to take every good thing for granted and compla…
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If you have experienced the nature in Norway, you will understand having holiday cottages is a nice way to spend money.
One or two, yes - but three? As I said, for sure it provides some happiness. But the lack of ideas is simply depressing. A similarly depressing thing I read is about people in Second Life simply recreating the houses they dream about in real life, despite having infinite possibilities.
There is a sense of real architectural visualization work going on. The process of constructing your dream house in 3D gives you a new way to see the house outside of your own mind.
Of course the outcomes of this kind of research are largely dependent on way it is designed. There is a similar study that finds Latin American countries to be among the happiest. Discussed here: http://www.livescience.com/50209-happiest-countries-latin-am...
As someone living in Norway who has been quite interested in the subject and read a lot about it. My understanding is that nordic countries tend to come at the top, not because people are jumping around with joy in the streets. More likely to find that in South America or Africa. Nordic happiness is a mild happiness. It is really about having few people very dissatisfied with life rather than having super happy peopl…
Which has an implicit assumption that happiness = living your "best possible life".
There are definitely people in Africa, Latin America, etc, who recognize they may have better prospects elsewhere, but if they're content with where they are… isn't that happiness too?
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The coastline is required to make a nice-ish reference to THHGTTG.
Aka more simply as H2G2, "the" and "to" aren't required in an acronym.
Using acronyms already adds some degree of ambiguity; shortening a commonly used acronym makes it basically unrecognizable, even when used within the proper context.
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I don't think that paints a very good picture of what Janteloven / Law of Jante is. In many other cultures, success is celebrated. Janteloven is the opposite of that, ensuring that success is criticized an seen as undeserved or lucky. I find it to be one of the worst aspects of Scandinavian culture, which is full of other good things, that I love.
The Law of Jante is not about success as such, and not really about criticizing success either. It is a law that says you should not pretend you are better than your peers. If success makes you act as if you are actually better than other people (bragging, acting arrogant, or just publicly suggesting that you actually deserve the success) you are met with disapproval. But the disapproval is not towards the success it…
http://denstoredanske.dk/Kunst_og_kultur/Litteratur/Nyere_mo...
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They do have one of the last truly representative governments left in the world though. Really cool system that hasnt been captured by big money interests and seems unlikely to be corrupted by the same any time soon
As a dual Norwegian/American citizen, I would posit that a lot of that has to do with scale (ie, scale is necessary, though certainly not sufficient). The Norwegian government is on the same scale as many American municipal governments! And then you have local governments under that, that are obviously much smaller and thus even more hyper-local than many of their American counterparts. The larger your state gets, th…
record rapes http://norwaytoday.info/news/record-high-number-rapes-bergen...