To Hell with Hygge

This is a blog about blogs.

A course (which shall remain nameless) that I am taking this semester seems to exist exclusively to pressure students to fabricate entertaining online content to satisfy a specific audience.

Does your Snapchat look lifeless? Do your Facebook friends know about your travel plans? When was the last time your Instagram photo received over 200 likes? Go to all lengths to create the illusion that you are indeed excelling at life on the dreariest of Mondays. If your life is not glamorous, that is okay! As long as you pretend that it is. Branding is life! This goes for all platforms, including blogging.

I think this is trash.

Arguably everyone with any degree of social media presence is guilty of this. Unfortunately for the Danish, we have adopted one of their words to describe this phenomenon: hygge. There is no direct English translation, but it most closely relates to the word coziness. Hygge is creating a film set in your living room before taking a photo to post on social media. It is misleading. Advertising our hygge allows us to flaunt a mirage of social capital. In 1972 in Ways of Seeing, John Berger says, “All publicity works upon anxiety. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamor. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.” Far before the age of social media, its dance with danger was foreshadowed. I am abroad for myself, not to prove to people that I am living in an uninterrupted utopia for four months.

This blog is intended to be equally as satisfying for me as it is for my audience, and it can only be therapeutic if it is genuine and unapologetic. I will attempt to publish a less chaotic version of my personal journal rather than create cosmetic content to appease the masses and entertain an audience. When you are pressured by some criteria of expectations regarding the posting of blogs, the objective can often be to get a block of ostentatious words posted rather than create an intimate piece of literature that calms my thoughts and provides my readers with something even remotely revolutionary. Sometimes the sexiest thing I do on a weekend is read multiple memoirs by female comedians while only leaving the apartment to walk across the street to the bakery for a fat slice of Oreo cheesecake. A blog that deceptively claims to reflect otherwise is a false representation.