learn much more if we are motivated, i.e. inspired, interested, and engaged. It happens even though every child is born with the capacity for boredom: boredom is an important alarm that signals that time is being wasted. Of course we can learn from our mistakes – in school and everywhere else – but it should rarely be our first priority. Problems and crises can obviously teach us a lot, but in general we function much better when we do not have problems and are not in crisis.
MEANINGLESS SELF-DISCIPLINE IS SELF-DESTRUCTIVE
I am not saying that discipline is not important either. On the contrary: being capable of pulling yourself together is very important. Recent studies actually show that hard work at school and in the workplace means twice as much for your success than your talent. But the hard work must be based on genuine interest and passion. Exams and awards you never really wanted are not worth very much.
And yes, children must learn to be considerate. But again: apart from in the earliest childhood, such learning should only happen when children see a positive reason for it. Conforming to an authority – at school, at work, anywhere – without understanding why a particular behavior is reasonable is like entering a treacherous swamp of pacifying pointlessness, which will surely damage us if sustained over time. “Why” and “because” are very important words for us.
SEIZE THE DAY, NO MATTER WHAT!
So whether we are active or inactive in our everyday lives is not simply a question of whether we choose to get up in the morning.
NOT UNTIL THE DAMAGE IS DONE
Since psychological knowledge is available to everyone, we might think that people would naturally accept it without reservation. As it turns out, it has not been accepted so easily. Indeed,
Psychology and health science have thus acquired an image strongly associated with illness. This is a shame, and it does not have to be this way. It is difficult to change, however: traditions have deep roots, and public subsidies are mainly channeled towards damage that has already occurred, rather than damage we want to prevent.
COSTLY SAVINGS
Approximately 5% of the Danish health sector budget is currently spent on preventive, health-promoting initiatives; the rest is spent on people who are already ill. And this in spite of the fact that most health economists agree that prevention is far cheaper than treatment. Martin Seligman has shown that only about 10% of the funding for research and development in psychology and psychiatry in the USA since World War II has been spent on the study of the brighter sides of life, with the rest allocated to studies of depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTS and other disorders.
As a consequence, we know a lot more about illness than we do about health. We have precise and internationally accepted classifications of a steadily growing, and already countless number of diagnoses, while still lacking a common definition of mental health. Back in 1946, the World Health Organization did propose a definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Yet, as absurd as it may sound, even this definition has always been controversial, because of a disagreement about the meaning of “complete”.
EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS
It goes without saying that sick people need help and treatment, and it is easy to argue in favor of all the help that is available. But if urgent needs receive almost all the attention and almost all the money, not much is left for long-term considerations. And without long-term thinking, our common future obviously becomes more uncertain. Many contemporary problems are a result of past decisions that may have been made more or less in the dark.
NO PILOT IN THE COCKPIT
Csikszentmihalyi has compared mankind with air travelers – some in first class, some in economy, and some stowed away in the cargo hold – at the moment they realize that there is no pilot in the cockpit. It is a terrifying but not completely misleading image for thinking about nuclear weapons, demographic explosion and environmental collapse. In the big picture, some things are clearly beyond our e are also multiple signs in our everyday lives that we need more perspective. We might once more consider questions like these:
Why do we frequently accept discipline without being given a satisfactory reason, when meaningless self-discipline unequivocally destroys our self-image, character and perspective? Why do many of us perceive a loss of influence when we are exposed to management, even though management that does not engage the staff by definition will have negative results? Why do other people’s weaknesses annoy us when effective organization presupposes that weakness is made irrelevant?
The fact that these questions are even relevant clearly demonstrates our embarrassment. And the fact that they are difficult to answer make them even more intrusive – not least psychologically.
Yet, before we dive deeper into psychology, from the Danish author’s point of writing, it seems appropriate to take a look at the social and cultural contexts in which Danes, Scandinavians, Northwestern Europeans, but probably most significantly Danes, live: partly as a background for a more nuanced understanding of psychological conditions, partly as an introductory counterweight to all the problems listed above. There is no doubt that, psychologically, as a nation contemporary Denmark seems to have been extremely lucky in the development of the social and cultural framework. Certainly, it is not perfect: something is still rotten in the state of Denmark, but not everything. In a psychological sense we are actually role models for other nations – in several ways.
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