In a dissertation chapter whose joke title was “Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Coziness,” I examined Copenhagen’s city-wide conversion to LED street lighting underway between 2015-2018. Drawing from an ethnographic study of green infrastructure design and experience, I consider how ideologies of hygge seep into everything from ground floor apartments to racially coded constructions of ‘Danishness.’ Some years later, I’m compelled to revisit that theory with a look at what I have come to regard as a novel variant of hyggemania.
Observers of the culture industry may recall the first wave of hyggemania that went viral in the fall of 2016, a year widely meme-ified as an existential dumpster fire. At the height of the craze, a spate of articles suddenly appeared across various popular media centered on the Danish concept of hygge, a term commonly translated as ‘coziness’ and glossed as a relaxed and intimate atmosphere conjured through the creature comforts of the Danish home. By the time it entered the English lexicon as a contender for Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2017, hygge was the subject of no fewer than 26 English language books published that year, consisting for the most part of glossy interior design spreads and craft and cookbooks, as well as an adult coloring book and even a novel.
In the years since—and particularly during the pandemic—coziness has become a powerful social media aesthetic, as sociologist Kathryn Jezer-Morton (2021) points out; its currency surged alongside case numbers. There are many subgenres of Instagram hygge (e.g. baked goods, knitwear, autumnal foliage), but the dominant note is vaguely Scandinavian domestic bliss. Iconic elements include blazing hearths and/or candles; frothy drinks, fuzzy textiles, and creamy hues. Artfully rumpled living rooms are High Hygge, but with the right lighting kitchens and bedrooms may also stage a cozy tableau. A diminutive scale can be conveyed by accessorizing with small children and swaddled pets. During a period of compounding crisis and disjuncture, these images seem to say, just build yourself a force field of calming neutrals. Light a candle, crack a book, and grab a manufactured-to-look-handmade mug of tea.
This all makes sense. Our social worlds have contracted; hygge reframes the stifling sense of being cooped up as comfy, inviting, snug. Etymologically, the word descends from Old Norse and first appears in Norwegian to denote 'comfort' and 'well-being.' While not tied to a specific setting per se, hygge is conventionally associated with the domestic interior, as anthropologist Judith Friedman Hansen notes (1976:54). Peak hygge is hjemlig hygge (homey hygge)—i.e. a canonical aesthetic of the largely white ‘momfluencer’ crowd (rarely does the hand holding the mug belong to a person of color).1
Detractors within Danish literature and more recently Danish media have critiqued hygge’s fierce commitment to preserving the inner sanctum as a contemptible form of bourgeois complacency, particularly when deemed ‘excessive.’ My favorite illustration of that critique comes from a 1916 poem by Danish writer Jeppe Åkjær, Historiens Sang, in which the speaker likens the imagined community of the Danish nation to a dozing infant enjoying a warm, hyggelige (cozy) glow as the world burns around its crib. I like this image because it skewers hygge as a marker of oblivious privilege: certain affordances must be in place. At its most basic the cozy ambiance requires a warm, safe shelter. It is softly lit and tastefully furnished; ideally with mismatched antiques (hygge thrives among the archaic and slightly disheveled). Sensuous appetites must be sated. Think warm, boozy beverages and home-cooked treats. But nothing too decadent (moderation, or at least the suggestion of it, is key). The vibe is above all SERENE. Worrying about, say, making rent or getting sick is not so cozy. Food insecurity is decidedly uncozy.
Economists tell us that Americans are blowing our dwindling stimulus savings—to the extent that they exist after buying the basics or paying down debt—on goods rather than services. Hence ever-tightening inventories foiled by the stagnating supply chain and inflation at a 40-year high. What kinds of back-ordered goods are those stimulus checks subsidizing? For those with disposable income, expenditures on home furnishings jumped 79.1% from April to May 2020 alone. Sales of high-end cookware, home exercise equipment, and downy loungewear have also spiked since Covid hit.
Opportunistically, e-commerce has monetized hygge as an antidote to everything from bad lighting to clinical depression. Consider Millennial furniture brand Burrow’s “Guide to Hygge,” which promises to turn whatever concept of cocooning you may hold on its head, “making it about happiness over hiding.” With the right combination of blonde woods, modular sectionals, and strategically placed lamps, it explains, you can build an impenetrable fortress of cozy. But why stop there? For maximum sedative effect, try enveloping yourself in a ‘blanket shirt’ or ‘nap dress.’
That the hygge industrial complex is ascendant in the work-from-home era is perhaps a symptom of what Carl Cederström and André Spicer (2015) describe as the “wellness syndrome.” Those afflicted are so fixated on individual self-care that they become anesthetized to collective conditions of exploitation under capitalism. That sounds right. More specifically, though, I’m beginning to think about the most recent wave of hyggemania as a species of what psychologists call “toxic positivity:” an inclination to dismiss experiences of distress with glib reassurances rather than empathy. While ostensibly well-intentioned, the effect is more alienating than comforting. Don’t hide. Be happy!
Remember early injunctions to reframe life under lockdown as an opportunity for self-improvement? Pursue a passion project! Bake a virtuosic sourdough! Get it all done while nursing your newborn! The notion that one should ‘optimize’ the vicissitudes of a global pandemic is monstrous. It is hustle culture rebranded as #hyggelife.
Cozy aesthetics threaten to suffocate us all under weighted blankets. To state the maddeningly obvious, scented candles are no substitute for the raft of social welfare programs required to address unevenly distributed hardship and trauma. This is not a snow day. The biosphere is combusting around our cribs. Bad vibes only!
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Rebecca Journey is an anthropologist and Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She writes and teaches at the intersection of aesthetics, environments, and semiotics of social difference. Her current book project, Future Perfect: Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, examines how the evolutionary and reformist logics of eugenic ideology animate the aesthetics of green urbanism in contemporary Denmark. Rebecca’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
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There is a lot to say here about the gendered and racialized dimensions of cozy media aesthetics. Someone do a dedicated study!
References
Cederström, Carl and Spicer, André. 2015. The Wellness Syndrome. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hansen, Judith Friedman. 1976. “The Proxemics of Danish Daily Life.” Studies in Visual Communication 3(1): 52-62.
Jezer-Morton, Kathryn. 2021. “Is ‘cozy season’ a cry for help?” Mothers Under the Influence. November 10. https://mothersundertheinfluence.substack.com/p/is-cozy-season-a-cry-for-help