Dreadfully sorry to be the one to break this news, but cozy as a concept, lifestyle, and marketing tactic are now officially OVER.
Last year, hygge (HOO-gah) wrapped its woolen fingers around the throats of depressed Americans and attempted to lift their spirits, one bowl of warm porridge at a time. This year, the New York Times reports that the Scandinavian predilection for knitwear, hot beverages, and tastefully spare interiors is coming for us all once again.
Hot on the heels of hygge is lykke (LOOK-ah), the Danish word for happiness— the feeling that one gets after achieving maximum hygge via a slow death by woolen blanket and gout from hot chocolate consumption. If you’re not into lifestyle edicts of the rhyming variety and find yourself developing an allergy to woolens and thick socks, turn your gaze to Sweden and get ready to learn lagom (lar-gum), the “Swedish ideal of moderation,” which is slightly more appealing but still entirely unnecessary. Where lykke and hygge have you burrowing into dank nests of warm, sweaty wool and not moving for hours at a time, lagom preaches a more austere way of living that includes “sleeping naked, buying secondhand furniture, crafting, eating lots of herring.” Nothing about that’s particularly egregious, but it’s time to put an end to this love affair with the Scandinavian way of living.
You cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Danish modern-adjacent home design blog full of round mirrors, brass and clean, white, walls; hygge is a capitalist tool used to force you to buy more sweaters and to double down on hiking socks. Every other coffee shop looks the exact same—white, blonde wood, brass fixtures, a branch of some sort—and it’s oppressive and tiresome and makes people want to scream!
Throw away that cardigan, girl. Plug up that chimney. Toss your large piles of blankets and woolen underpants atop a pile of scrubby brush and set that shit on fire. We’re slowly being strangled to death by scarves and throws and blankets and sweaters. No more hygge. Death to lykke. It’s over!