Why are some people happier than others? And how can we improve our quality of life? Those are the two main questions I have been trying to answer for more than a decade.
I run the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen — and, no, we don’t have unicorns or chocolate fountains in the office. We try to understand through science how our jobs, money, and relationships influence happiness — ours and yours.
Our goal: To help people across the globe do as the Danish do — and live a happier and more fulfilling life in 2025.
Happiness at Work: It’s Possible—Really
My latest book could not be more timely or aptly named — “The Art of Danish Living – How the World’s Happiest People Find Joy at Work.” My greatest superpower as a native Dane and happiness researcher is that I believe work can and should be a source of happiness. If we design it right.
A growing number of studies suggest that by looking at your job differently you can hack your way to a higher level of satisfaction.
Changing your view of work has been coined “job crafting” by Amy Wrzesniewski, now a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and Jane Dutton, Professor Emerita of Business Administration and Psychology at the Michigan Ross School of Business.
Profs. Wrzesniewski and Dutton have examined a broad range of employees — tech workers, hospital cleaners, factory workers, and staffers in a women’s advocacy nonprofit.
Amy and her team noticed a key difference among the hospital cleaners, not necessarily the most desirable of jobs. Some of them saw themselves solely as cleaners, while others focused on other functions or even invented tasks that were not part of the job description, like making people laugh.
That was the case for one guy that Amy interviewed. As part of the hospital janitorial staff, his job was to clean up vomit when people were sick from chemotherapy. But his view was that cleaning was just a segment of his job — his real job was to cheer people up when they were feeling down, such as after chemo.
If a patient felt ashamed about vomiting all over the floor, his go-to joke would be, “Please keep doing that —that is how I get my paycheck. If you can . . . aim for the floor in the future, maybe I can get some overtime.”
We all have a list of tasks that we need to accomplish. But many of us have an opportunity to mind-hack ourselves into more happiness at work, no matter the tasks.
The key is to redefine what we actually do at work, building in more of the stuff that we enjoy in our jobs.
The Joy of Arbejdsfællesskab: A Work Community
Beyond paid work, you may also find happiness in forming what we Danes call an “arbejdsfællesskab” — a “work community” — a gathering of friends and neighbors organized to accomplish a task, something that may be a common good for the group and that we cannot accomplish alone.
My friend Ida and her family have worked together in this way with two other families. Every year, each of the families plans a big project, for instance, to build an outdoor pizza oven, a chicken coop or a fence for the land where their sheep graze.
Together, they complete the three projects, one in the spring, one in the summer, and one in the autumn, on rotation. Each family makes sure the necessary materials and supplies are bought, and everyone brings tools. They work, eat, and laugh together. Sounds like a great weekend to me.
Escaping the Hedonic Treadmill
As we enter 2025, this might be a good time to escape the financial hedonic treadmill. Don’t get me wrong, money does matter when it comes to happiness. But mainly because being without money is a cause of stress, worry, and unhappiness.
Not being able to put food on the table is undoubtedly not a happy situation. People in well-paying jobs are happier and more satisfied with their lives and jobs than people who make less money.
However, after a certain level of need is met, additional income does not move the needle much when it comes to additional happiness. With money, as with most things in life, we see diminishing, marginal returns when it comes to happiness. Your first slice of cake is wonderful — slice number eight, not so much. It is the same with money.
The first money you receive is very important and will secure food on the table and a roof over your head. But if you already make a lot of money, then the more you earn, the more you tend to spend it on silly things like a coat for your dog.
In addition, people often care more about their relative income than their absolute income. How much money do I make compared to Karen in accounting, or the Joneses next door?
And the thing is, you are always going to find somebody who makes more money than you — and there is always going to be a higher number. I call it the-one-more-million-then-I-will-be-happy-syndrome. You won’t.
Designing Happiness at Home
Instead, there is a much higher happiness return on investing in your relationships and this is where the Danish tradition of hygge comes in. Hygge can best be described as the art of creating a nice atmosphere.
And sometimes, we need no more than to light a candle to cultivate a sense of hygge around our dinner tables.
“After I read about hygge I went out and bought these two chandeliers and we started lighting them at dinner,” one of my readers told me.
He and his wife have three sons: 18-year-old twins and a son who was 15 at the time. When he first started to light candles, his boys teased him. “What’s with the romance, Dad? Do you want to have dinner alone with Mom?”
But soon he noticed small changes around the dinner table. Time seemed to slow down. The teenagers became more talkative. The change in atmosphere at the table put the boys in a storytelling mood.
“They don’t just shovel in the food anymore, they sip their wine, they tell us about their day.” Dinnertime is no longer just about food — it is about Hygge. And now the boys are the ones who light the candles for dinner.
A small design change had a big impact. A different dinner setup had improved how a family interacted. And I think this is what our home should offer us — a place to be happy even in times of turbulence.
For a happier 2025, the key is to focus on what you can control. We may not always have control over the events affecting us — but we always have control over how we approach things. And while we may live in a turbulent world, we may still make our lives a happy place.
In our own little worlds that we call home, we are masters of the universe. And maybe finding happiness at home this year will make us better equipped to help the world — and our offices — become a better place.
Meik Wiking is CEO of the Happiness Research Institute and author of the new book “The Art of Danish Living – How the World’s Happiest People Find Joy at Work.“
