A key to life satisfaction? Lower your expectations.

Why do citizens of Denmark have score higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction? A brief article in today's Science section of the New York Times points to a study suggesting an answer: the country’s secret is a culture of low expectations. "...on surveys, Danes continually report lower expectations for the year to come, compared with most other nations... If you’re a big guy, you expect to be on the top all the time and you’re disappointed when things don’t go well. But when you’re down at the bottom .. you hang on, you don’t expect much, and once in a while you win, and it’s that much better....year after year, they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark,”