A new hygge has dropped, but you’ll need to take off your cosy slippers and put down your cinnamon bun to try it. There is a real danger of getting the wrong end of the stick when we get enthusiastic about other nations’ lifestyles – such as when the New York Times writes about modern Britons enjoying boiled mutton for lunch, or “cavorting” in swamps, and we all get cross – but this comes straight from the Viking’s mouth.
That’s Meik Wiking, the perfectly named chief executive of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. Writing in Stylist, Wiking suggests we consider adopting a Norwegian concept that requires no blankets or candles: dugnadsånd, approximately translated as “community spirit”. He likens dugnadsånd to barn-raising in 18th- and 19th-century North America, describing a “collective willingness of people to come together in the context of community projects – emphasising cooperation and selflessness”.
Could it catch on here? In a way, it already has. There aren’t many barns that need raising in 2025, but our communities definitely need and rely on collective action. With bare-bones budgets, threadbare public services and cuts, cuts, cuts, community spirit is already at least partly responsible for ensuring hungry children are fed, effluent discharged into our waterways is highlighted (why is this a thing?) and refugees are welcomed, among other things.
There is a very fair question to be asked about whether, really, individuals and communities should be plugging those gaping holes. To British ears, dugnadsånd could evoke a dread echo of David Cameron’s “big society” – the expedient outsourcing of the state’s obligations to a patchwork of charitable and voluntary organisations when what really needs to happen is for very rich people and corporations to pay vastly more tax.
But if I’ve grasped dugnadsånd correctly, from what Wiking writes, it is mostly more modest: neighbours helping neighbours, communities clearing rubbish or creating playgrounds. Anyone can be the beneficiary, as well as the giver. “Helping each other out through reciprocation made the whole community stronger, more resilient and, I would argue, also happier,” he says.
I can well believe that, because there’s hard evidence that volunteering is good for you. A 2023 review of 28 studies on volunteering concluded there was “consistent evidence to support effects on general health and wellbeing and quality of life”; there is even evidence of “reduced mortality”. Social prescribers refer clients for volunteering opportunities, because believing that you have something to contribute, and acting on it, feels good. Reciprocity is baked in, because everyone benefits.
I know how that feels. I have been a trustee of a local environmental charity for the past few years, and while I rarely feel particularly helpful and sometimes actively the opposite (especially facing budget spreadsheets), I always feel less despairing when I’m there – not least because it has shown me how many people will cheerfully pick nappies and Monster cans out of freezing mud, or do itchy, sweaty battle with invasive plants. My husband (who actually has useful skills) gets something similar from his slots at the local repair cafe: not every lamp or toaster gets fixed, but there is a sense of building something.
It also feels like training for what lies ahead. When government in Britain is bitterly disappointing and in other places is actively, enthusiastically furthering the end of the world, there will certainly be more, and worse, natural disasters and doubtless more human-made ones. Do we really want to try to survive them atomised, sitting on stockpiles of tinned goods? In the New York Times, an exploration of how the horrifying current political climate has supercharged intellectual interest in the idea of solidarity included a description of it that stuck with me: “a distinctive and delicate form of intimacy”. It is intimate, also vulnerable, to accept and express when we need help; to want to offer it but not know how, or to feel inept when we do; to accept we need each other.
Dugnadsånd – practical solidarity, really – seems like a way of practising that, of training our collective thinking, collective action, but also our collective vulnerability muscles. It is either that, or it’s something completely different – over to you, Norway.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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