How do you like your feeling of contentment? Is it stern and herring-flavoured, a wispy Danish cream cake, a downy pillow of sushi or whiskey-smoked?

Amateurs might be unaware of the Swedish concept of lagom – chilling in balance – or the Japanese theory of ikigai – finding a reason to get up in the morning. No one, however, could still be unfamiliar with hygge, the Danish ideal of cosy self-indulgence: sitting around in socks in front of an open fire with an excess of dairy-centred calories “finding your happy”.

To this Schleswig-Holstein question of ethnic lifestyle philosophy now must be added còsagach, an old Gaelic word that VisitScotland has relaunched as “feeling snug, sheltered and warm”.

Essentially, it posits the ancient Highland wisdom that, when the weather is bad, indoors is nice; that holding a dram by a roaring fire as the North Sea batters the panes is preferable to, say, shivering in a cardboard canoe.

This is clearly very interesting information, but maybe not as fascinating as our endless desire for new forms of snug. Sinking back into a warm duvet of the soul feels like a natural response to a torrid world. In the early 2000s, they called it “cocooning” – it characterised that sense of being master and commander of the DVD stack while flicking past disasters on the domestic news.

True, taking control of the stuff that is around you is a good first step to anything more positive. But it is worrying when that is all that bothers us. As the rebadging of còsagach shows, the lifestyle pendulum has swung towards self-care – at a moment when we need more self-discipline than ever.

Is there a Ugandan mode of living where you just get on with it when everything is a bit rubbish? Could the Dutch idea of sticking your finger in a dyke even when it is already flooded be a better model for these dark times than fairy lights and tube socks? Do Brazilians have a hitherto unheralded way of resisting abject political times? If so, how could it be turned into 250 pages of full-bleed colour photography with its own table at Waterstones? These are the existential questions our civilisation must now answer.

After all, there’s more to life than bliss.