With its charming streets, clean air, fashionable people and near perfect infrastructure it’s not hard to see why Copenhagen was voted the most liveable city in the world in 2026. Things here just work.
Much of this is what drew me to the Danish capital in the summer of 2021, fresh out of university. The summers are particularly magic. The city becomes a giant lido, canals teeming with people of all ages hopping in and out of the water (which is kept clean enough for public swimming all year round).
Just spending one summer here as a tourist bred a complete determination in me to overcome the forces of Brexit, so that my “real adult life” could be spent living in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, the process of moving here ended up being one of the last times that I worked particularly hard towards well… anything.
I initially came as a tourist then went home, determined, and applied for jobs for a couple of months. I got one in marketing which was happy to sponsor a Danish work visa for me on my British passport – Denmark has some of the hardest immigration policies in all of Europe. Since I was company-sponsored, the immigration process was relatively hands-off and granted me a soft landing into the world of work (I’m not sure if it would be so easy now…) in a place where it is set up generally to be very very easy.
In the last five years, that’s the one thing I’ve learned I don’t like about Denmark. Challenge, or dare I say hard work and hustle, is simply not built into the culture here, at least not in the way I knew it growing up in the UK with Kenyan immigrant parents.
It starts long before the workplace. Children do not receive any formal grades until they are 14 to 15 years old. Young adults take years to start and then finish university (two to three gap years at a time are very normal), often dropping out and coming back and dropping out again. It’s an attitude that transfers directly to the formal workplace.
That is not to say that these are objectively bad things – and an easy life is obviously preferable to one of endless toil and hardship – but they do contribute to a culture that might not be best suited to anyone who thinks themselves ambitious, at least career-wise.
There is something else to it. A silent social rule that plays a part in why working hard is not something that is prioritised or praised much in Denmark: that is Janteloven, or “the law of jante”. It is similar to the Australian idea of “tall poppy syndrome”, essentially a collective agreement that conforming is always the right thing to do, and that any kind of standing out or striving that might put one above their peers should be discouraged.
I have found that too much ambition is frowned upon under janteloven – working harder and getting further will award you few accolades beyond some disapproving (or confused) looks. Janteloven also contributes to flat hierarchies in the workplace. There isn’t much of a culture of needing to impress, and the work atmosphere tends to be very relaxed (which is often sold as a benefit of living here but I’ve found the opposite).
Compared to the few months I spent working in the UK and the stories I hear from my friends still there, unrealistic expectations and micromanaging seem to occur on a much less frequent basis here. As great as this hands-off approach can be, it does sometimes make promotion a tricky thing to negotiate as tenure and effort do not guarantee it, like they might in other countries. This is a situation that I found myself in, wanting to grow at work without there being space for it, or feeling as though my ambition to be challenged was violating the social fabric. The additional factor of being a Black immigrant woman never helped that.
Denmark is also notorious for its high cost of living and equally notorious high salaries. Yes, we do away with a big chunk of it in income tax, the average rate being around 36 per cent. But even with that as the case, the monthly take-home salary of the average twentysomething in Denmark still remains higher than their UK counterparts.
Rent is reasonable, even in the capital, and the property ladder is relatively accessible to locals through various schemes and subsidised housing. This all means that a Danish salary can make for a financially comfortable life – another perk, but also one that creates a sense of complacency. It’s the kind of comfort that can keep you stuck in a role where you are dissatisfied, neither learning nor growing, because you are financially comfortable.
So, when did I start coming to terms with all of this? When I started finding myself bored and frustrated, moving nowhere, no matter the role I was in. I’ve met and spoken with other career-driven twentysomethings in other cities: from UN workers in Nairobi who were already on their second or third international deployment by the age of 26, to 25-year-old senior consultants in London.
Witnessing these worlds opened me up to the ambition I have and the realisation that doesn’t seem to be the same for my peers here. It meant I constantly felt the need to dip out of my life in Copenhagen; I wasn’t looking for adventure, but for challenge. For the friction that I felt sorely lacking in my everyday life. I remedied this by spending prolonged periods of time outside of Denmark.
I often say to friends that I feel like I found Denmark and Danish work culture a bit too early on. There have been many wonderful things about this half-a-decade in Copenhagen: the financial freedom, time and flexibility mentioned being a few of them. But that has come with the worry that I have handicapped my future career prospects by spending such a big chunk of my twenties here.
The relaxed work culture can be great, especially later in life when one is established and needs to fit work around a family or slowing down, but it does not create the kind of environment of challenge and growth that I believe to be essential in this part of early adulthood.
So, I’ll be leaving Copenhagen for Nairobi, at the end of this year. Where hustle weaves itself more naturally into the fabric of people’s everyday, where I can take on challenges and expand in my career without worrying about offending anyone.