Hygge is like Fight Club

It has now been 4 months since I left Chile and about 3 months since I left South America and certain memories and moments have begun popping up in my mind. One of them is a conversation I had with my good friend Tom from Australia a night over pizza in Copacabana. Tom asked me to name one typical Danish thing, and of course "hygge" was the first thing I thought of. The thing about "hygge" is that Danes use the term everyday about different things and it's both a adjective and a verb, but there doesn't exist a good translation in English or Spanish.

Tom looking over Copacabana

 As the conversation developed I actually learn more and more about "hygge" and all its facets - if you can go so far to talk about the facets of "hygge". But explaining it to a person to whom "hygge" is a completely foreign concept, made me more aware of my own culture.

I told Tom that you use "hygge" about situations where you are having a good time. The most commonly used translation in English is "cosy" or "fun", but that doesn't really cover it. For example, a game of football with your friends can be fun, but a Dane won't describe it as being "hygge".

Rule number 1

So as the conversation went along, we came up with a set of rules and after a while, we found the first rule: “Hygge” revolves around food. If not food, then some sort of beverage is at least present. It can be anything from popcorn to a full-out-blown Sunday brunch. Quickly, Tom concluded that he often has “hygge” with his girlfriend.

Rule number 2

But here I realized something that I actually never had thought about before. You don’t have “hygge” with your girlfriend/boyfriend or refer to a date as being “hygge”. If you do so, it means that there is a lack of passion. And so we had rule number two: “Hygge” is with friends and family; not with your love interest. Tom, thinking that he now got the idea of “hygge”, happily declared that our dinner was “hygge”.

Rule number 3

But by describing the dinner as “hygge”, something odd happened: the “hygge” disappeared. I  had never given it any thought, but I realized that you don’t talk about “hygge” in the present tense, only in the past tense. If you think something is "hygge", you should only mention it when it has passed and is over. And so we had the third rule.

“So hygge is like Fight Club,” Tom jokingly said, “The first rule of hygge is: you don’t talk about hygge. The second rule of hygge is: you DO NOT talk about hygge”.

And so, in a funny way, Fight Club became the common cultural denominator, where both a Dane with “hygge” in her cultural DNA and an Australian guy were able to understand the otherwise fleeting concept of “hygge”.