How Did Those Nordic and Japanese Ideas About Living Turn Into a "Middle-Class Philosophy of Life"? | QDaily Research Lab

Life is hard and everyone needs a little comfort — so comfort became something you buy.

In search of inner peace, people have spent the past couple of years copying templates for the good life from one country after another. Before anyone had quite gotten a grip on hygge, Denmark's cult of small pleasures, Sweden's lagom principle ("just right") was already passé, and ikigai, the philosophy of living that comes from Okinawa, Japan, had overtaken them both — entering the copying list under the label "the new hygge," and turning up constantly in publishing, in the media, and on every platform in the lifestyle business, at home and abroad.

Ikigai is the English transliteration of the Japanese word 生き甲斐 (pronounced ee-kee-gah-ee). Literally, "gai" means meaning or value and "iki" means life; a direct translation would be "the meaning of life."

In English, "life" can mean grand existence or it can mean daily living; "iki" leans toward the latter. In a 2001 paper on ikigai, the Japanese clinical psychologist Akihiro Hasegawa explained that the small everyday moments that make you feel "doing all of this was worth it" are the moments you become aware of your own ikigai — and whatever made it worth it is your ikigai.

A BBC report on the subject says the most authoritative account of ikigai currently comes from a 1966 book, 《生きがいについて》 (On Ikigai). Its author, Mieko Kamiya, was a psychiatrist, and she argued that the meaning of ikigai sits close to "happiness" but is subtly different: ikigai is the thing that "lets you keep hoping even when things aren't going well right now."

According to Gordon Mathews, an anthropology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who has studied ikigai for more than twenty years, ikigai is really two concepts combined: ittaiken (a sense of unity) and jiko jitsugen (self-realization). The first is a state of harmony with an identity or a group — raising children because you are a "mother," working out of a sense of belonging to your company. The second is the satisfaction that comes from getting something done: you raise children, or work hard, because doing it gives you a sense of achievement.

Put these scholars together and the philosophy of ikigai comes out as this: settle on a life goal that gives you an identity and a sense of self-realization, and every small daily thing tied to it becomes something you can do happily.

None of this is new. Maslow's pyramid of needs, explained ten thousand times a year, already puts self-realization at the top of human needs. University careers advice tells you that when job-hunting you should "align personal needs with social needs, which benefits students' self-realization." Even the most ordinary inspirational WeChat account can hold forth at length on knowing yourself and fitting into society.

So why does a new word with an old core send people running around spreading the news as if they had sighted a new continent?

When platforms introduce ikigai, they tend to reach for a line that could have come out of an anime: ikigai is "the reason that wakes you up every morning." The trick of this explanation is that it sounds like it means something while saying nothing at all. Under one forum post that introduced ikigai this way, the comments ran to "Isn't it my alarm clock that wakes me up every day?" and "It's my dog! Barking to be walked."

The other common explanation is a Venn diagram, which goes like this:

The overlap between what you love and what you're good at is passion; the overlap between what you're good at and what you can be paid for is profession; the overlap between what you can be paid for and what the world needs is vocation; the overlap between what the world needs and what you love to do is mission; and where all four overlap is your ikigai.

The concept does get much clearer this way. But demanding something you both love and are good at, which also creates value and feeds you, looks like nothing so much as a luxury good.

In July this year, Tom Ough, a reporter at Britain's Daily Telegraph, ran a week-long experiment in search of ikigai, hunting for "the reason that wakes you up." His methods included asking himself the self-assessment question a bestselling author had suggested — "think about what you'd most want to do on a Saturday morning with nothing planned" — eating the way Japanese people eat, which stopped at bitter melon, and asking his friends what their ikigai was. Going by his conclusions, ikigai ends up closer to formulations like "find the valuable thing your heart really wants to do" and "follow your heart, and take responsibility for what you follow it into."

There is nothing wrong with formulations like these — just as there is nothing wrong with inspirational writing itself. The risk is either that it gets overused, or that people tire of it, bristle at this plain advice and decide it is worth nothing. There is a third risk: that it is used as pretty wrapping paper for selling things, and people stop trying to understand it and simply consume it.

With that in mind, buzzwords like hygge, lagom and ikigai have also picked up another name: middle-class philosophies of life.

They share a quiet and rather cruel trait. They generally come from places at the top of pollsters' "happiness index" rankings, and they catch on — as "other people's secret to happiness" — in places at the bottom of the same rankings.

Turn up the magnification on that cruel truth and you notice that the books and articles about them all carry a version of the same subtitle: the Danish/Swedish/Japanese secret of happy living, happiness secrets from happy places. The assumption behind it is that "we are unhappy right now because we haven't got the hang of it," and that "the ideal way of life has a secret, here is the secret, ready to eat straight out of the packet." When lifestyle columns introduce ikigai or hygge, what they are introducing is success literature for living.

Success literature has a market because people, feeling unsuccessful, are always curious about other people's success stories and "tricks." Lifestyle concepts spread the same way: people are dissatisfied with the life they have, so they grow curious about anyone who seems contented and want to copy the contentment.

But other people's contentment comes with a context, and copying it usually means quoting it out of context.

"Lagom" means something close to "just enough." According to Kathleen Bryson, who holds a PhD in evolutionary anthropology from University College London, the phrase Swedes say most often is "Lagom är bäst" (the right amount is best) — the belief that neither too much nor too little is the best state. In a social setting it can be read as "appropriate"; of food, "mild"; in interior decoration, "less is more"; in lifestyle choices, "sustainable"; in business dealings, "logical." All of these carry the same meaning underneath: whatever the context, the decision you make is the best one for you or your team.

"Hygge" emphasizes brief happiness and ease; at its core it is about satisfaction in a particular moment. Against the blanket promotion of hygge's charms, the author of 《北欧，冰与火之地的寻真之地》 (roughly, In Search of the Real Nordic Lands of Ice and Fire) offers another reading. Hygge, he says, is really a deceptive kind of relaxation — an informal, distinctly Danish coziness or cheer that is in fact highly regimented, governed by strict social etiquette, and that pressures people mercilessly into conformity. Denmark's happiness index is a "scam," he argues, because "in Denmark, being unhappy is shameful," so nobody says they are unhappy.

Both hygge and lagom were born out of the Nordic pursuit of public welfare and democratic equality, and were meant to play down luxury spending and class stratification. As they spread, though, they were labeled a "new middle-class philosophy of life" and became one more way for elites to display their economic standing. Anything with a rustic quality is sold as authenticity, anything to do with craft or handiwork is dressed up as refinement, anything natural and plain is defined as high-end.

Ikigai, framed as a life pursuit, is in fact tied to Japan's severe aging problem. It is a solution found for the newly retired young old, who feel adrift, encouraging people to keep joining a group after retirement — something like a hobby club — so that life has a purpose to aim at and the long twilight years pass more easily. But as it spread, it was described instead as a middle-class home-decorating guide, or a cure-all for young people facing a quarter-life crisis.

In the end, every "middle-class philosophy of life" is stripped of its original context and turns into a contemporary variant of slow living or healing culture, a shared keyword for a set of products. Its popularity is no different in kind from the popularity of stress-relief gadgets like coloring books.

More than 20 books about hygge living were published in 2016 alone, among them How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life, whose author, Signe Johansen, is a chef and food writer, and The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort and Connection, whose author, Louisa Thomsen Brits, sells Danish furniture on the e-commerce site hygge.com.

Food bloggers develop hygge recipes. Fashion bloggers promote the lagom look and talk you into shopping at their own storefronts, where you can buy an approximately lagom-style brand like Acne. The home-decor platform Haohaozhu introduces ikigai and, while it is at it, introduces decorating rules that supposedly suit ikigai — set up a work area at home with a craft table, a magazine rack, a music corner — and recommends brands of alarm clock that will leave you "delighted at having won back some time for yourself," which makes you genuinely puzzled: didn't it say a few paragraphs ago that "the reason you wake up in the morning is ikigai"? So why has it turned around and started recommending alarm clocks?

And you will ask what the middle class is. Here is an unofficial answer: people who hold a little bit of an asset, but not enough of it to produce any sense of security, and who therefore struggle to survive in order to hold onto that little bit. The middle class is not one kind of person; it is many, many kinds of people rolled together.

None of it is easy. In that spirit, we have also gathered up some of the talking points/trends/sales pitches involved:

How to Obtain IKIGAI

1. Set aside a spot in your home for what you love and are good at. It can be a work desk that ends up as a place to pile junk, or a drinks bar decorated with a coffee machine you will not use in a hundred years.

2. What you should hear every morning when you get up is the sound of ikigai calling you, and for that you should obviously buy a 200-yuan smart floor-mat alarm clock, so you can leave behind the corporate-drone life of being jolted awake by a phone alarm without having to change jobs. Though mostly what you are leaving behind is the phone alarm.

3. One secret of long life is keeping busy with what you love and are good at; a full life makes you attend to your own inner needs and leaves no time for meeting other people's expectations. The aunties doing square dancing in the park, for example.

4. Open up your life a different way: tend houseplants and vegetables, and plan your brand-new, ikigai-filled life according to a "30-Day Life Guide" somebody else wrote for you.

5. Buy a calendar, or a planner, or a notebook, or any other hallucinogenic prop that makes you feel "now I can finally beat my procrastination" and that you still won't be halfway through three years later.

How to Experience Lagom

1. A black or gray coat, a thick cashmere scarf, a black skirt or narrow-leg jeans, white sneakers or Chelsea boots, a backpack, a brimless beanie — collect the full set and you will have a clean, restrained lagom fashion style.

2. Getting that lagom fashion style may unbalance your budget, which breaks the lagom rule of spending, "not too much, not too little, just right." The good news is that whether you buy it or not, you end up with at least one kind of lagom.

3. Long silences, few words — all to hold a lagom state of "balancing social life against time alone."

4. You can enjoy good food while drinking detox juice and pedaling a spin bike, because this is a world of advice full of contrasts and contradictions, and happily lagom is there to back you up in finding a delicate, nonexistent illusion of balance in the middle.

5. Your living space should be practical and good-looking, your clothes should be practical and good-looking… everything turns on moderation. The great insight of the lagom idea is that, wedged between consumerism and minimalism, it offers a perfect solution to your ever-growing appetite for spending and your stretched finances, and so lets you carry on exactly as before with a clear conscience.

How to Feel HYGGE

1. Oatmeal fits the hygge idea perfectly. It is food that comforts the soul. And food that comforts the soul is absolutely consistent with the hygge idea.

2. Bacon, the food Danes love most: on the road to hygge you need to get through 6.5 pounds of it a year, and put on roughly the same in body weight.

3. Noma is one of the most hygge restaurants in the world. The food there is expensive, and expensive things can feel insufficiently hygge, but the lighting is right.

4. Keep a relaxed frame of mind, value your quality of life over your job, switch into weekend mode by one o'clock on Friday afternoon, refuse to work overtime on public holidays, and ask your boss a day in advance for time off because you have "a friend's holiday party to go to and cozy hygge time to share with family and friends"… all of which, of course, assumes you also have two years of unemployment benefit worth up to 90% of your old salary.

5. The handiest way to actually experience hygge is to wrap yourself in a blanket and drink a cup of hot tea, cosplaying a frail girl on her period, or to light an unscented candle on every spare surface in your home, cosplaying a muttering fortune-teller.

Enjoy life, everyone!

Illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao