‘What are we holding on to, Sam?’

‘That there’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.’

Like Tolkien, Hemingway once wrote that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. These days, it is easier to notice the fighting rather than what is fine. It is easy to point towards the grey skies and dark clouds, but perhaps we all need to be more like Samwise the Stout-hearted (but preferably a bit less furry in the feet department) and see what is good in this world of ours.

A friend of mine, Rita, grew up in Latvia during the Soviet era. It may not have been Mordor, but it was a time of fear and mistrust, a time when every window was covered with a curtain and when communities were shaped by suspicion and scarcity. Occasionally, a truck carrying bananas would arrive from Vietnam. Not knowing when bananas would be available again, my friend and her family would buy as many as they could afford and could carry.

Then the waiting would begin, as the bananas would still be green and not ready to eat. They would place the fruit in a dark cabinet to make it ripen faster. Watching bananas turn from green to yellow was like magic in a city that was fifty shades of grey. As a child, Rita had thought only three colours existed: black, grey and brown. Her dad decided to change that and he took her on a treasure hunt around the city: to look for colour, for beauty and for the good in the world.

This is the intention of this book: to take you treasure hunting; to go in pursuit of happiness; to find the good that does exist in this world – and to bring this into the light so that, together, we can help it spread. Books are wonderful idea-spreaders. My previous book, The Little Book of Hygge, shared the Danish concept of everyday happiness with the world. The book encouraged its readers to focus on the simple pleasures in life and, since its publication, I have received an avalanche of kind letters from around the world.

One of them was from Sarah, who teaches five-year-olds in the UK and has long had an interest in the mental health of children and how happiness has an impact on their capacity to learn. ‘I have read your book and decided to introduce hygge into my classroom,’ she wrote. She told me how the class put up fairy lights, shared snacks, lit a candle and enjoyed story-time. ‘We even put a YouTube video of a log fire on our interactive whiteboard to make it feel cosier. On these long winter days which seem so dreary after Christmas, it is cheering up the whole class and staff no end. I am trying to figure out how to measure the impact of this on the children’s well-being, but I guess the relaxed, smiling faces are measure enough!’

That is essentially my job as CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen: to measure, understand and generate happiness. At the institute, we explore the causes and effects of human happiness and work towards improving the quality of life of people across the world.

My work has allowed me to talk to people from all four corners of the earth: from Copenhagen mayors to Mexican street food vendors, from Indian cab drivers to the Minister of Happiness in the United Arab Emirates. It has taught me two things. First of all, that we may be Danish, Mexican, Indian, Emirati, or any other nationality, but we are first and foremost humans. We are not as different from each other as we may think. The hopes of those in Copenhagen and Guadalajara and the dreams of those in New York, Delhi and Dubai all point towards the same beacon: happiness. Lykke is the Danish word for ‘happiness’, but you might refer to it as felicidad if you are Spanish, or Glück or bonheur if you are German or French. No matter what you call it, story-time will light up smiles in classrooms in the same way wherever you are in the world.

A couple of years ago, I was skiing with some friends in Italy. We had finished for the day and were enjoying the sun and coffee on the balcony of our cabin. Then somebody realized that we had leftover pizza in the fridge, and I exclaimed: ‘Is this happiness? I think so.’ And I wasn’t the only one. Despite the fact that my friends on the balcony were from different countries – Denmark, India and the US – we all felt that sharing food with friends in the soft warmth of a March sun, overlooking the beautiful, snow-covered mountains, was pretty damn close to happiness. We might have been born on different continents, raised in different cultures, schooled in different languages, but we all shared the same feeling that this was happiness.

On a much bigger and more scientific scale, this is what we can use happiness data to understand. What do happy people have in common? Whether you are from Denmark, the US or India, what are the common denominators of happiness? We have been doing this kind of research for years in terms of health: for example, what are the common denominators for those people who live to be a hundred years old? Because of these studies, we know that alcohol, tobacco, exercise and our diet all have an effect on life expectancy. At the Happiness Research Institute, we use the same methods to understand what it is that matters for happiness, life satisfaction and quality of life.

Allow me to take you to the home of the Happiness Research Institute – the capital of happiness: Copenhagen.

DENMARK: THE HAPPINESS SUPERPOWER?

On the morning of 9 November 2016, I was woken at 5 a.m. by the emergency alarm in the hotel I was staying in. I was in the heart of Paris for a round of interviews and the city was approaching the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the city.

Outside the lobby, the guests gathered, bleary-eyed, in their white bathrobes. At 5.30 a.m., the hotel was given the all-clear, but there was no point in me trying to get back to sleep. Adrenalin was still pumping through me, and I had just returned from Asia, so my body clock was seven hours ahead of local time. I decided I might as well work and opened my suitcase to get my laptop. That’s when I discovered I had left my brand-new computer on the plane (always check the seat pocket!). And I hadn’t backed up the first chapters of this book anywhere other than on the now missing laptop.

I was frustrated, tired and angry with myself. I thought I could do with some good news and realized the votes would by now have been counted in the US presidential election and I thought it might cheer me up to see the victory speech of the first female US president, so I turned on the news.

That day I had eight interviews lined up. Eight journalists, who would most likely all ask the question: ‘You study happiness – so how happy are you?’

So, how happy was I? Can you quantify feelings? How do we measure happiness?

The way the world has been measuring happiness for decades can be summed up like this: Imagine two friends meeting after a long time. ‘How are you?’ the one friend asks the other. ‘I make 40,800 euros per year,’ she replies. No one talks like this, but this is how we have been measuring well-being traditionally. We have been saying that money equals happiness. And while money may matter – it is not the only thing that contributes to our happiness.

Unfortunately, that is how we have been measuring happiness up until recently. We have been using income as a proxy for happiness, well-being or quality of life and using GDP per capita to measure our progress as nations. One of the reasons for this is that income – national or personal – is objective. However, happiness is not. Happiness is subjective.

This is often the first response I get when people hear that the Happiness Research Institute tries to measure happiness:

‘How can you measure happiness, it is so subjective?’

Yes, of course happiness is subjective, and it should be. To me, that is not an issue. What I care about in my research is how you feel about your life. That is what counts. I believe you are the best judge of whether you are happy or not. How you feel is our new metric – and then I try to understand why you feel that way. If you are happier than your neighbour, who has the bigger house, the fancy car and the perfect spouse, by our measures, you are the one that is doing something right.

Working with subjective measures is difficult, but it is not impossible. We do it all the time when it comes to stress, anxiety and depression, which are also subjective phenomena. At the end of the day, it is all about how we as individuals perceive our lives.

Happiness can mean different things to different people. You may have one perception of what happiness is, I may have another. Right now, we put the happiness label on different things, which, from a scientific point of view, makes it difficult to work around. So, the first thing we must do is to break the concept of happiness down into its various parts.

For instance, if we were to look at how the economy is doing, we could break it down into indicators such as GDP, growth and interest and unemployment rates. Each indicator gives us additional information about how the economy is doing. The same thing goes for happiness. It is an umbrella term. So, we break it down and look at the different components. Let’s go back to that morning in Paris. How happy was I?

When we look at how I was feeling at that moment, I was angry with myself for forgetting the computer, I was tired, and I was sad to hear that a lot of Americans would be facing four difficult years. In short, I was angry, tired and sad. Happy? Not so much, and pretty far from sitting on a sun-bathed balcony in the Alps eating leftover pizza with friends. On the other hand, I was in the middle of a book tour and had the privilege of talking to people around the world about my work and about happiness, so, overall, life was not treating me badly.

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF HAPPINESS