11 Jun How to live a happy & meaningful life by learning from the Scandinavians
via Medium by Thomas Oppong
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.”
Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden are ranked among the top happiest places in the world. With a focus on balance and connection, each country has developed its own way of living life to the fullest.
Millions of Scandinavians enjoy a healthy work-life balance, high standards of living with less pressure, less stress, and more time for everything they enjoy and love doing.
Looking for a lifestyle change?
Use some of these Scandinavian life philosophies to change your perception about living a meaningful and fulfilling life.
Rethinking the keys to happiness.
Lagom
Lagom (pronounced “lar-gohm”) is is a huge part of the culture in Sweden.
It means “Not too little. Not too much. Just right.”
This single word encapsulates the entire Swedish socially democratic philosophy on life: that everyone should have enough but not too much.
The concept encourages an overarching balance across our lives: everything in moderation.
At the office, professionals who work hard — but not to the detriment of other parts of their lives — are following the lagom ideal.
Rather than burning yourself out with a 60-hour working week and then getting stressed, lagom encourages balance and living somewhere in the middle.
Other features include frugality, stress reduction, striking the perfect balance between work and play and focusing on environmental concerns and sustainability.
The archetypical Swedish proverb, “Lagom är bäst”, literally means, “The right amount is best” but is also translated as “Enough is as good as a feast” and “There is virtue in moderation”.
You are probably exercising lagom is many aspects of your life already.
For Swedes, lagom is a lifestyle, a habit of mind. ‘There’s an internal mindset of acceptance and contentment in Sweden. That’s part of the secret to being happy — don’t obsess about it.
The philosophy of lagom is beautifully simple, and offers an alternative to the idea of ‘always seeking the next best thing.
Anna Brones explains in her book, Live Lagom: Balanced Living the Swedish Way, “Applying a sense of lagom to our everyday lives — in what we eat, what we wear, how we live, how we work — might just be the trick for embracing a more balanced, sustainable lifestyle that welcomes the pleasures of existence rather than those of consumption.”
…keep reading the full & original article HERE