Danes are the happiest people in the world! Just ask happy bunny Sarah Hedegaard Pedersen (below)! Or are they? Denmark is a fairy-tale country filled with happy beer-drinking and biking people, but there’s a dark side too as we’ve still got a reasonably high suicide rate.
According to happiness coach Meik Wiking, this is partly because it’s simply more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. He and nine others spoke at TEDxCopenhagen at Bremen Teater on April 7 turning common notions of the world upside down, reconsidering everything from insects to nuclear waste to happiness.
It’s a given that economic inequality can cause unrest, but how about well-being inequality? Take social media, for instance: don’t we all know that negative feeling when friends post pictures of “the most amazing breakfast?” It makes your own slightly brown banana and instant coffee seem a bit sad.
To stick with the Ted Talks, maybe we shouldn’t just reconsider how our social media behaviour affects the well-being of others, maybe we should all begin eating insects. They are sustainable and their nutritional effects are helping solve challenges in developing countries. Maybe they could also help close the well-being gap in the Western World?
So what’s stopping you? Grab a grasshopper snack and watch the talks tedxcopenhagen.dk
