The Happiness Museum
Designed to connect us with different ways of understanding what happiness is and why we might be looking for it in all the wrong places, Copenhagen’s Happiness Museum is what we all need right now.
Seek this out if: Concepts like hygge have caught your attention, you are interested in how you can pursue happiness in your own life, or ideas of wellbeing have recently risen up your agenda.
What is it: After many people had expressed interest in visiting the offices of The Happiness Research Institute — an independent thinktank that aims to influence public policy through investigating what makes some societies happier than others — the team there decided to give people the space they hoped to find. The Museum of Happiness opened in the basement of an 18th-century building in Copenhagen’s historical center in summer 2020. Although it had been delayed due to the emergence of the pandemic, its existence anticipates a moment when we could all do with more joy, positivity, and wellbeing in our lives. The Museum has been designed to connect us with different ways of understanding what happiness is and why we might be looking for it in all the wrong places (hint more human connection, less emotionally driven Amazon purchases).
Why you’ll love it: When faced with “an experience machine” asking you to choose between the constant pleasure of an illusory life or moments of suffering in a real one, which do you choose? When listening to laughter, do you laugh too? Finding a wallet of cash on the floor, do you hand it in? What would you write on a post-it when asked what your happiest memory is or your definition of happiness?
At The Happiness Museum, you’re encouraged to participate, learning first-hand what happiness is and what it isn’t. Over just 2,585 square feet and eight rooms, visitors learn about happiness from every angle, from how it manifests physiologically to how it shifts according to geography, how thinkers have evolved an understanding of it from ancient Greeks to modern-day, to where our scientific understanding now rests. There’s a Trump MAGA hat representing the lowest level of happiness experienced in the UK (the day of his inauguration). A range of self-help books showing how the promise of finding happiness has become front and center in many of our lives. A harmonica that captures the happy beginning of a relationship.
What you need to know: The Happiness Museum is perfectly placed; it’s located in a country that is regularly cited as one of the world’s happiest – the UN World Happiness Report in 2020 put it second only to Finland. Within the museum, you’ll find displays on why this might be and what Nordic happiness really is. It’s also headed by Happiness Institute CEO Meik Wiking who literally wrote the bestselling book on Hygge, the Danish way to live life well, that has captured our imagination (and increased candle sales) worldwide.
How to bring this into your life wherever you are: Take The Happy Course and learn how to apply science-based principles on happiness to your own situation. Or brighten dinner conversations with The Hygge Game.
Why we think it’s different: The work of the Happiness Museum is not just to incite smiles (and to allow you to play with Mona Lisa’s), but to make you think about what happiness really is and why we’re so obsessed with it. Our knee-jerk path to it might be via rainbows and unicorns, but often we get it wrong. We seek out things that actually don’t make us happy — like the products that are sold to us that make us think they’ll make us fulfilled — and lean on strategies that don’t serve our lives well, like immediate dopamine hits that come from social media but don’t sustain us in the long term. The museum reframes some of what we think we know and gives us tools to find happiness in ways that are more sustaining. Like this quote from Epicurus: “Of all the means to ensure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.” A fleeting visit to the Museum is designed to instill a more lasting and nuanced relationship with happiness in our own lives.
In their own words: “A small museum about the big things in life. At The Happiness Museum you will understand why Denmark is often called the happiest country on earth, what hygge has got to do with it, and how you can measure something as subjective as happiness. The Happiness Museum is created by The Happiness Research Institute, a think tank focusing on well-being, happiness and quality of life.”
Inspired by: These words from Immanuel Kant: “Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.” Not this song on happiness by Lana del Rey, Happiness is a Butterfly (Happiness is a butterfly / Try to catch it like every night / It escapes from my hands into moonlight).
To find out more: Website / Instagram
Additionally, try: The Color Factory / The Museum of Ice Cream
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
ARoS refers to itself as a ‘mental fitness center’ which we just love. We’re very much on board with that approach to our museums.
“ARoS is the perfect place for social interaction. It is a place where visitors are presented with new perspectives and opportunities to broaden their outlook. In all its diverse activities, ARoS wants to radiate attractiveness, relevance, and integrity. ARoS, therefore, is an outstanding universe appealing to both the heart and the brain. Looking at art is very like standing on a trampoline. You need to be moving in order to gain something from it and, after a time, you find yourself jumping higher and seeing more of the world. This is what art is about at ARoS. It is mental fitness. ”
Usually, when an art museum decides it wants to be one of the top 10 in the world, it focuses on building a stellar collection of masterpieces. ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum is doing it differently by focusing on its connections with the local community and society at large. That means it’s committing to us as people not just us as an audience.
Take its latest exhibition, Tomorrow is the Question, which faces our possible futures as humans given the crises we're in and is one of the many initiatives at the museum inspired by the UN seventeen sustainable development goals (others include Hunger and Poverty). There’s the awe-inspiring rooftop work by Olafur Eliasson, Your rainbow panorama, as well as James Turrell’s wondrous expansion of the museum with the Next Level, and the ARoS Triennial, which in 2017 looked at nature and environmental issues in contexts beyond the museums walls. Plus there’s Art & Yoga, artists in residence, and an emphasis on local food and craftsmanship in its culinary offerings. It is this commitment to 'experience, insight and reflection' that is making ARoS, one of Europe’s largest museums, also maybe one of its most relevant.
In fact Director Erlend Hoyersten is explicitly making good health and well-being a goal for this contemporary arts institution:
'A good life is a life full of meaning and social relations. We humans need to commit ourselves, to know things, and to mean something to others. Joy is not about predictability, control or absence of pain. Joy is often about something we cannot be quite sure of. Art disrupts. Art asks questions. Art helps us to see what does not yet exist. Only by imagining a better world can we actually get a better world. If you can think it, you can do it.’
ARoS refers to itself as a ‘mental fitness center’ which we just love. We’re very much on board with that approach to our museums. Here we get to reach as people for whatever it is we need in our lives: curiosity, connection, awe and wonder amongst these. Giving ourselves over to new ideas, to new ways of being, to new visual languages, means we also get to give ourselves over to an expanded sense of ourselves, of our worlds and of each other.
Watch this video: it will give you shivers for how our museums can function differently. Campfires for today? Absolutely.
To find out more: Website https://en.aros.dk / Instagram @arosartmuseum / Facebook @ARoSArtMuseum / Instagram @arosartmuseum