The Happiest Place on Earth
A review of Finland, the country
The Good Life
There was an ad on Finnish TV, it was about coffee. I couldn’t find a video of the ad, so here’s my description of the scenes from memory:
A wanderer hikes through the forests, encounters elevated views and the grandeur of nature, sets up by a stream, opens a watercolour kit, paints the landscape, fishes, cooks over a campfire, makes some coffee, and enjoys a quiet moment.
The setting was supposed to be in the early 20th century, but it’s could just as well be many years later. One not-so-subtle message of the ad is that it requires very little (naturally coffee is still required) to engage in living and to experience the positive qualities of being alive and free, to encapsulate a moment that substantiates the ingredients of human flourishing.
Lagerfeuerromantik
A moment of enjoyment and its “building materials” — that was the topic I was thinking about at the time. Around the world, consumers spend a lot to go on holidays, it’s a growing and seemingly indispensable part of the economy. Alain de Botton mentioned a metaphor of passengers on the same descending flight, some starting and some returning from holidays, with rather different internal states of mind. There is something we attribute to the significance of being at a place, that is not self-evident from the mere presence at that place.
A few weeks before Vappu, our student guild took us on an overnight trip to a camping site of the Scouts in the Nuuksio National Park, to go through the capstone rites which make us worthy of receiving the lakki. The cabin’s kitchen had no running water — it came from a pump outside (there was nonetheless a sauna) — and the beds were a long stretch of wooden platform on two levels. Yet, the stay was an enjoyable if not elevating experience, with Wes Anderson aesthetics and a texture of coziness.
In April, I went on trip to Bremen, organised by the univeristy students there. Activities spread across several days for us to learn about the State of Bremen, Germany, and Europe. Some evenings, the students would cook up dinner in a seminar room over portable electrical hot-plates (as there was hardly a kitchen), “Ja!” brand (the supermarket’s bulk brand) pasta served with “Ja!” brand pasta sauce, for example — it really demonstrated that you don’t need much to have a social event and moments of bonding.
Especially impressive was the local students’ alacrity in taking care of the chores, setting everything up, and cleaning up and returning everything to order afterwards, all with ready willingness and swift spirit— essentially Che’s new man incarnate. Much like the Scouts, the students organising the events were motivated not by the Invisible Hand, but by taking pride in their belonging and dedicated service to a group.
The Joiners
In Finland, student life is particularly vibrant. Each faculty has a student “guild” with its own colour-themed overall uniforms. There are many events, parties, excursions through the year which create the student life. Each year, new students get initiated into their guild, and people form strong and close bonds. They also tend to form those bonds early and stick to clusters.
In the wider society, the numbers of association memberships in Finland are high relative to its population — the average Finn belongs to 3 organisations (Helander & Laaksonen, 1999). You might say it’s nation of “joiners” (though not entirely in Arendt’s sense), and the student guilds reflect that.
Through belonging to a group rich with its own rituals and symbolisms, through participation and volunteering and working towards the group’s goals, the experience of a student’s formative years also becomes bright and significant in an environment where, as Adam Driver put it, by tradition or practical purpose, instantly “everything has meaning”.
The Least Failed State
Finland has been named the world’s happiest country, two years in a row — now this article took so long to write, three years. When the results came out the first time, there was a bit of confusion and surprise — because few of us thought Finns were known for being happy.
Happiness can be an elusive concept. In this case, perhaps the definition of happiness is not about the frequency of experiencing an ecstatic state of mind, but about human development and wellbeing, as measured by frameworks of public governance. To paraphrase, it is a country where things work (instead of fall apart), in all the ways that a state can fail (and many states do fail), Finland has done its best to not fail.
Finland has strong institutions from the ground up. If you look at the meeting minutes of student hobby clubs, you see a lot of structure. Even residential buildings have a tenant committee with a book of protocols that goes through heaps of processes and formalities.
The Finns have had a lot of practice, in the traditions of civil society, institutions, and structure. Organisations are also given greater trust and responsibilities: the student union has a sizeable budget, and housing co-ops (OAS) are large and powerful enough that they not just manage housing, but buy land and develop real estate.
On one hand, progress is almost universally occurring (cf. Rosling, Pinker), on the other hand, it’s practically a mystery why in these blissful nation states people pay taxes instead of evade taxes, why the police are helpful instead of corrupt, when, across the world, chaos and failed conditions appear to be the default direction towards which without continued effort things tend to slide.
Happiness Self-Made
Paradoxically, etymology often associates happiness with happenstance rather than pursuits powered by a sense of agency. In Finnish, it’s ‘onneus’; in German it’s ‘Glück’; the stem of ‘happy’ is ‘hap-’ (‘chance’, ‘luck’).
You woke up today and found yourself to be in certain surroundings. If you woke up one day and found your conscious self to be in a KGB prison (there’s a museum in Riga which we did visit), that would indeed be very bad. The depth of suffering, of how much one can be tormented, is effectively bottomless. The solace of “it could be worse” doesn’t carry much meaning, when it could definitely always be worse. If we were to comprehend the horror of this basic condition, it would be sufficient to render us into shock, and it would be hard to carry on with living.
Rats are highly sentient and social mammals, sometimes kept as house pets. On the internet, you can see that some rats have incredibly good lives: soft beds, hammocks, miniature gardens, air humidifier, snacks, treats, practically living in mansions with safety and affection. Meanwhile, a multitude of rats shiver in sewers, get flattened by cars or fed to snakes. The pampered pet rats with comfortable lives expire after two short years on Earth.
You can get your pet rats a strawberry-themed cushiony “house” for a trivial amount of money, a bag of nuts for them is a windfall. How easy it is to have this incredibly good life, and how infinitely easier to not have it, kind of put the arbitrariness of fortunes into perspective. When you think about the volatility and transience of it all, it just obliterates any naïve sense of agency.
For humans, it’s worse. Not only are we in the same situation of not mattering at all to the universe — we also become aware of this very fact, and conscious of our own feebleness and predestined mortality and vacuum of worth.
Layover in a Lucid Dream
Returning from Bremen, I visited Amsterdam for an evening. My experience on magic truffles was one of solipsism. At first everything became ultra high-resolution and particularly vivid, there were some visual illusions, images and objects wobbled — but that was not the impressive thing — what stood out was that the subjective qualities of reality and of walking through it also started to wobble.
It felt like a lucid dream, a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming. It’s like wandering through a virtual reality world, and you know that the reality was created by the memories and imaginations of your own mind.
In many of my mundane dreams in the past, the central theme was often some kind of puzzle: trying to catch a train, or find an exit, or get to a dinner party. In each of these dreams the journey unravels and rolls on and on, but never seems to get to the destination. In the magical lucid dream, there were many puzzles, large and small, presented in very subtle forms with the subjective and qualitative texture as the medium. There was the puzzle of Descartes (who was a few hundred years ago not far away studying anatomy with his Dutch friends and contemplating consciousness) about what can be trusted to objectively exist as opposed to be conjured up in a dream.
Perhaps “puzzles” is a misnomer, perhaps the experiences were more like terse “koans” or introspective parables: a bundle of ‘mis-en-scene’ along with a stream of logic — a cryptic, pithy story presented not in words but in a contextual world. and the feelings and reasoning from that standpoint.
One of these illustrations was about solipsism: known autonomous agents (e.g. friends in person and on the phone, shop-keepers) started to come across with a quality that is resemblant of characters in a dream. Instead of conscious beings with their own minds, it felt like they were from the brain’s creation or some non-play characters in a virtual story scripted by Descartes’ “cunning devil”.
Let me stop here and jump to the revelation (solving the puzzle, not in a Eureka moment, but in a subtle and circular, self-referential, with the answer having been there all along kind of way), and the moral was that much of the world’s trouble arises from not seeing the validity of other minds.
To Thy Own Self
There was an ad for Face ID showing that it recognises you even when your appearance changes over time. Unlocking a phone is about authentication, that is, verifying an established identity, proving that you are the phone’s owner you claim to be, that you are you.
What is identity? Implicitly, your identity is something that stays with you. You put on a cardigan, you take it off, you grow a beard or lose your hair, you are still you. There is an “ontological essence” that makes you distinctly you and not someone else. But what actually does stay? Your location changes, your knowledge changes, your beliefs and attitudes may even change, the cells and atoms are probably not the same ones from years ago. How very different is an individual at age 5 vs. 15 vs. 25? Yet, there is a sense of “continuity”, that it is the same person, only at different stages.
The time we live in is not quite the same as the centuries that came before. Centuries ago people lived their whole lives and died in the village in which they were born. Many years ago people went to work at the same job for 40 years then retired. Today, what field we study, what languages we speak, and where we reside have a much larger range of variability compared to the conditions of our ancestors. The individual identity has become much more volatile, and the sense of continuity is often challenged.
One subsequent development is that the notion of identity then hinges more on distinctness, that you are a different individual from your peers, your friends, or someone on the streets. People try to assert their individuality — to varying degrees of success. It’s like many Finns get tattoos to “be different”, but they also don’t save up for it, then so many of them unvaryingly end up covered in trashy tattoos. Society becomes structurally more isolated and insular at the individual level, then you have the Swedish Theory of Love and thousands of lonesome people falling for scams every year.
The Crowd
The other subsequent development is the resurgence of group psychology. People reassert their identity by being part of something larger, and derive meaning and sense of worth from being in a group. Strength in numbers drowns out the salience of mortality or insignificance.
The central weakness of typical groups is quite obviously that it is not a community of the mind, but a bond of happenstances — what is nationalism otherwise really? Group identity, that is often defined as much by what it is, as by what others are not, tends to be an identity based on exclusivity itself.
A strong group culture has inherent within its genesis the potential for in-group out-group polarisation. The consequences of dismissing, diminishing, and denying the validity of other minds are truly rather glaring from history.
Without willingness for understanding and dialogue, what we are stuck with is a sliding scale of dealing with other minds as if they were non-existent.
Spectrum of Regard:
admiration <- deference <- courtesy <- (tolerance/indifference)
(tolerance/indifference) -> contempt -> disgust -> hatredWe have not been professing solipsism, but our behaviour and attitude reflect just as much. The best we have achieved is the neither-here-nor-there state of “indifference”, and sliding towards distrust and alienation is always easier than towards the other way.
Snowflake Factory
Shallow assertions of individuality often produce, ironically, duplication. In a way, emo teenagers all put on a similar look, or hipsters fastidiously compose their dress code to project non-caring and end up looking stereotypical. The “blank slate” ideology tells kids they can grow up to be whatever they want to be, and everyone is unique and special, yet if you ask high-schoolers to write down what they want to be, their supposed “passion”, it turns out to be inanely repetitive — according to Cal Newport, most want to be celebrities.
Also new to our time is the explosion of inbound information about vicarious experiences, people get to see on TV and social media how other people live and all that is out there, which creates an “illusion of possibilities”. While their parents’ generations were eager to surreptitiously compare houses and cars with neighbours, the current generation is obsessed with and anxious about how they are “living life to the full”, desperate to flaunt and try to one-up each other on glamour and glitter in appearance and attitude.
In this regard, how is Finland faring? Sure, people are not struggling to reinvent civil engineering like at the Fyre festival — by tradition and by practical necessity events are still well organised — clueless hipsters are not running the show.
On the theatre of ideas, however, the youth of Finland have all but achieved the singular “mind meld”: a fashionable opinion on every subject of current affairs with “people-don’t-have-maps” style non-sequiturs; convenient outrages promoted by surfer dudes selling action kits; ignorant about the world yet full of verdicts on how other people should live; a narrow, solipsistic world-view combined with a self-inflated sense of grandiosity.
Smoke and Fog
In late April, the university hosted a “conference” called “Radical Relevances”. There were interesting topics, but also a pervasive presence of the most insincere and intellectually dishonest bunch: the usual homeopaths and energy healers who talk about higher dimensions and quantum physics but never worked with eigenvectors in four dimensions. If there’s anyone sprinting with haste towards irrelevance, this lot would be it.
One of the main events featured a “performance” presentation about the smog in Beijing: stock videos of smoke/steam pouring heavily out of industrial chimneys, dramatic background sound effects, audio fragments of interviews with subtitles. The overall message was: the apocalypse is here, cities are made uninhabitable, and it’s all caused by modernity and development and wealth creation.
Why do people worry more about plane crashes than car crashes? Or shark attacks more than heart attacks? The same crowds shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to making a significant dent in the effort of divesting fossil fuels. These were the same crowds that adamantly opposed, sabotaged, and smeared against the development of modernised nuclear technologies as if Chernobyl was their own Back Yard.
Disproportionate fear (the way people fear sharks more than cars) and dishonest fear (the way people claim “mobile signals cause cancer”, “vaccine causes autism”, “GMO causes poisoning”) drove the world to the deadlock that it’s in now.
A crisis calls not for hysteria but for work. That flood barrier you’ll build relies on engineering. Energy solutions rely on engineering. And engineering requires knowledge and study and hard work. Even the “socially just” wealth transfer schemes require people to go to work and pay into them.
Challenges are to be met. Not far from the smog-shrouded cities, there are vast ranges where people have dedicated their working life to desert reclamation and reforestation. Over decades, and over several generations, they have conquered the desert. “Man will not merely endure, he will prevail.”
With work, development and progress occur. While the hysterics go on raging against hydro-dams, against wind turbines, against batteries, people in those cities are working. One day you might be surprised to find that they are not choking to death, 5G has not fried their brains, and using mobile apps has not turned them into grey-clad zombies marching through Orwellian apocalypse.
Cinema is a massive industry because people are instinctively fascinated by stories, or more precisely, drawn to heroicised perspectives. A point of conflict, a crisis, a ticking clock, a seemingly insurmountable challenge, a world in dire peril — the suspense sells.
Which of these lends itself to convenient screenplays: A) Tidy up the desk, read books, build skills, gain employment, pay taxes and pensions, make incremental and expanding improvements in production and governance; or B) Champion an overhaul of the political and economic system?
That is perhaps why we don’t hear so much about Norman Borlaug or Alexandra Elbakyan or those who are quietly doing work over decades, in fact there will be no shortage of cynics jumping in feeding off the buzz of denigrating their work.
The search for relevance is driven by a common longing particularly strong in the youth, and a problem of our time is that even in universities, the path of this search is plagued by luddites and hysterics masquerading as academics, and fake artists who churn out, what is to art, gossip to discourse.
Wide is the Gate
In April, there was also a panel seminar / marketing event on “Nordic Branding” centred around “Hygge” and other books based on Nordic concepts. The event had a packed audience that could hardly fit into the space. It looks like these were topics people really cared about.
The topic of living well does tie into this whole thing about the world’s happiest places. There is value in hygge. It’s the pursuit of the elevating rather than the necessary that makes a civilisation. What is the utility of fine tablecloths and candles and songs of beauty? It is the small things, the extra things. The moments of experienced living, in this case embodied by a cozy atmosphere, are precisely what make life worth living.
It is about quality, more than quantity. It is about moral aesthetics, more than moral arithmetics. It’s the band playing on a sinking Titanic, it’s Proximo facing his shadows and dust, it’s the drop that outweighs an ocean — more than Peter Singer’s calculation of mosquito nets.
Meanwhile, that event was perhaps packed too full. Either people are experiencing some kind of deprivation and thirst for instructions on how to live, or that it’s an easy pursuit that draws a self-congratulatory crowd, like the multitude of startup hipsters at Slush running in a rush towards nowhere.
In comparison, we had this seminar course on sound spatialisation at the Media Lab — really great materials, interesting topics, and carefully planned. I got an email saying that although dozens have signed up, most have flaked, and I was the 5th participant that marked the threshold of whether the course would continue or be cancelled. Unlike hygge, the calling for the pursuit of knowledge does not arouse much attendance.
The course was enjoyable. It’s my wishful thinking that people would be more into it, and in general, have a desire to develop original thought, to pursue deep knowledge, and to connect. More desire for sophistication and sincerity. And less of all that “noble savage”, “ignorance is bliss”, “winging it with confidence”, doing AI with PowerPoint, anti-sophistication fluff.
I also wanted to talk about the environment for the pursuit of knowledge, and the redemptive qualities of work and their role in happiness… perhaps that’s all for now, since Finns are actually quite good at that.
