By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published: March 16, 2024
This week I ran across yet another glowing article about Suomi, or for those who speak English, Finland.
The piece sought to explain how this northern European nation, with perhaps some of the least pleasant year-round weather and a reputation for melancholic moodiness and an absence of smiling, continues to be lionized globally for its successes.
I wasn’t searching for this piece, published March 14, 2024, and clumsily called “I’m a psychologist in Finland, the No. 1 happiest country in the world: 4 phrases we use every day.”
I’m sure Google’s extensive profile of me pushed this CNBC story to the top of my Google smartphone newsfeed. But it jumped out because it highlighted positive storytelling about Finland, which I’ve seen widely repeated by many credible media outlets and many independent scholars. A good example of in-depth analysis is the 2021 mostly academic book Finntopia, by Danny Dorling and Annika Koljonen. I read it half a year ago, and I strongly recommend it. It does a wonderful job answering a simple question: “What can we learn from the world’s happiest country?”
In his short article, Frank Martela, a professor at Finland’s Aalto University, walked this familiar storytelling path previously used by Dorling and Koljonen. In his case, Martela highlighted common Finnish sayings used every day by the Finnish people to explain Finland’s ongoing global dominance in creating human happiness for its people.
The article fits a larger trend I’ve been seeing for a couple of years in the popular and academic worlds praising this Nordic nation of nearly 5.6 million people.
“Our national self-image is that we’re quiet, introverted and somewhat melancholy types,” writes Martela. “This doesn’t exactly align with being the happiest people on earth.”
Instead of using extensive research comparing Finland to its peer nations, Martela choses four expressions and their deeper meaning in helping to explain the country’s stunning standing six years in a row as the world’s “happiest country.” That’s a ranking assigned by the United Nations, based a broad set of criteria looking at individual and society wellbeing, supported by both data and survey sentiment. This United Nations report was first published in 2013 and continues to attract significant attention—especially for reporters seeking stories—as a tool to examine how societies and populations feels about themselves, despite being overly academic and lacking much needed plain language for ordinary people to understand.
Why Finland matters to me
At a personal level, Finland is a country I have grown to admire. I am connected to it intimately, by blood kinship and fate. In short, my path in life inevitably led me to my two trips to this country of two of my great grandparents.
My journey of discovery began about a year ago, when I vowed to visit the country in person. I plunged deeply into its culture and history and explored my personal family connections that profoundly tie me to the flat farmlands of the country’s midsection where I trace some of my ancestors. I visited twice in a span of six months, in September 2023 and February 2024.
Now, it seems I can’t go a week without seeing some gushing praise online, in mostly English language media and documentaries I scan, praising Finland’s famous sauna culture, with 3 million saunas, or its stellar global standing on key social, health, political, and economic equality measurements.
In April 2021, the online journal Slate published a similar and positive article about Finland and its Nordic neighbors by writer Jukka Savolainen called “The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness.”
“Nobody is more skeptical than the Finns about the notion that we are the world’s happiest people,” Savolainen writes. “To be fair, this is hardly the only global ranking we’ve topped recently. We are totally fine with our reputation of having the best educational system (not true), lowest levels of corruption (probably), most sustainable economy (meh), and so forth. But happiest country? Give us a break.”
Savolainen also saw important similarities among Finland’s Nordic neighbors, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Those nations, he suggests, share a Nordic cultural trait called “lagom,” which means embracing modesty and rejecting excess, including in Finland. This, he says, “encourages contentment with life’s bare necessities,” and if one has these, one should not complain and therefore be happy.
Naturally I read Martela’s article with interest on these broader themes. Finland, at this stage in my life, has become a wonderful research project and personal journey, especially as I continue to build personal relations with my kin in Finland that started with my trip meeting family in Kurikka and Tampere, Finland, in September 2023.
A quarter of my ancestry is Finnish, on the maternal side of my biological family. This connection feels much more important to me as I get older and as my U.S. family members pass away, like my biological uncle two days before the end of 2023, and I have more space to explore my wider kin network.
As an adoptee, who was denied knowledge of my biological and ethnic identity by Michigan state adoption laws, I feel greater urgency in making up for more than two and a half decades of lost time denied this knowledge by this broken system of separating families by the millions.
Also, my two visits since September 2023 have let me learn in person about its successes providing for the health and wellbeing of its people and, more importantly, let me connect with my newly found Finnish relatives!
Four phrases to understand Finnish wellbeing
Martela, in my view, wisely notes that the Finns themselves are rather bemused by such outside rankings. The four sayings he picks, in his view, help explain how Finland’s successes, rooted in equality, education, and transparency, can help outsiders grasp the foundation to national betterment.
Martela writes the expression, “Who has happiness should hide it/ Kenellä on onnea, sen pitäisi piilottaa se,” points to Finnish cultural preferences to not broadcast success.
He explains that in Finland, if you’ve found happiness, you shouldn’t flaunt it. Finns are less inclined to compare themselves to others. This attitude continues to be reportedly widely by many social commentators about Finnish modesty as a national characteristic—something Finns have been explaining for years now publicly.
In my estimation, Finns also maintain a quiet demeanor in how they plan pragmatically for adversity, all rooted in historic memory. While I can’t confirm my anecdotal observations with data, I always saw a level of quiet strength radiate from ordinary people I met in September 2023 in the nicest places, like a ferry crossing on Enonvesi Lake in the southern lake region. On the ferry, I chatted with two friendly and burly, bearded men in work overalls, who were happy to meet an American visitor so far from any tourist area. They wished me a joyful visit. I instantly liked them. I can’t help but think this pair would be the ones I would want on my side in bar fight or as military reservists who might one day be called to defend the Finnish border from Russian aggression—a reality ever present on the Finnish psyche. As the Wilson Center noted in March 2023, when Finland prepared to join NATO two months later, “the historical memory of Russian treatment of Finland never faded.” To live next to the “Russian bear” is to remain calmly ready, which the Russians equally understand with trepidation.
Another saying Martela points too, as have other writers oozing praise for Finland, is: “The pessimist will never be disappointed/ Pessimisti ei tule koskaan pettymään.”
Finns are no stranger to misfortune. The land that became a nation was born following centuries of foreign occupation, first by Sweden from the 1300s to 1809, and then for more than another century by Russia, ending in 1917. Finland endured a brutal invasion by the USSR in late 1939 and nearly five years of war with the USSR and also Nazi Germany, its onetime ally for four years before they were driven out of Lapland.
Finns, by history and circumstance, know the bitter cruelties of disappointment and hardship. As recently as the mid-1860s, one-tenth of the population starved to death in a catastrophic famine due to bad weather and crop failures. These catastrophic events would have directly impacted my ancestors in the farming region of Finland called South Ostrobothnia, where most Finnish emigres to the United States came from, like my great grandparents.
It’s no surprise that Finns are never disappointed with small pleasures, like a walk in the woods or simple, healthy food, and of course the great joy of simple cup of dark coffee at all hours of the day.
A third saying Martela notes is: “Everyone is the blacksmith of their own happiness/ Jokainen on oman onnensa seppä.” For Martela, this Finnish attitude means, philosophically, that each person has to forge their happiness and that nothing is provided on a proverbial “silver platter.”
As a continuing student of Finnish culture, I strongly believe this saying has a deep cultural resonance, connecting to the great Finnish myth called the Kalevala, compiled from oral storytellers in the Keralian region of Finland by the Finnish folklorist Elias Lönnrot and first published in1835. Finland recognizes this national tale with a national holiday called Kalevala Day, on February 28 each year.
One of the great characters from that national story and myth is Ilmarinen, a powerful blacksmith, who can create practically anything and who created a magic object of power called the Sampo. He ultimately experienced lost love. Finns, in the way they design communities and have found the joy of hot saunas in a cold, wintery country, show this trait nationally for forging happiness.
Finnish identity also is deeply defined by a singular cultural trait, “sisu.” It has been described as stubborn resolve and the Finns’ individual and national strength and ability “to keep going no matter what.” In short, in each Finnish person lies great reservoirs of power, and they know how to harness that strength collectively and personally.
Finally, Martela points to the saying: “Some have happiness, everyone has summer/Joillakin on onnea, kaikilla on kesä.” In his mind, this refers to the Finns’ ability to not be overcome by changes in fortune. Life can be good and bad, but, as he notes, “We Finns know that, no matter the situation, you can always count on one thing: sooner or later, summer will come to us all.”
Finnish history embodies this saying best of all. Modern Finland arose from great suffering and violence in World War II, repeated economic downturns in the decades that followed, and steady collective actions that have turned the country to be a worthy model for governance. Throughout it all, the Finnish people found a way to succeed, and do so with a positive attitude focused on national wellbeing.
I observed this my own way. I experienced how my Finnish relatives greeted what I considered to be good fortune: reconnecting with lost kin from the United States. They saw it this way too.
This event had a huge role in chance, really. Even then, the unlikely reforging of familial ties, with a man who was relinquished from his Finnish-American mother as an infant, was warmly embraced. They never questioned its meaning. I found them, and they simply returned the happiness of connecting in person.
On my second wonderful trip to Finland in February 2024, I remember the joy everyone had around a dinner table, with disparate related family members, who all came together to welcome me as a long-lost and now found family member.
As we celebrated this wonderful event at my aunt and her husband’s cozy home in Kurikka, it felt like the sunshine of summer was smiling on us all, despite the calendar and snow outdoors showing us the month of February. I believe we shared the same feelings.
No one needed to question why this happened.
We accepted it and radiated in its glow with smoked salmon, wine, and wild-picked berries from the Finnish countryside. Oh, of course, we finished it all with a pot of coffee!
Related stories about my Finnish connections:
- Blood is thicker than water: Meeting my kin in Finland (Nov. 5, 2023)
- Kinship and ethnic ancestries matter in our bones (March 12, 2023)
Author note: Four days after publishing my story, the United Nations ranked Finland the “happiest country in the world” for an astounding seventh year in a row, in its annual World Happiness Report, released for the year 2024 on March 19, 2024. Find the full report and executive summary here. “The top 10 countries have remained much the same since before COVID. Finland is still top, with Denmark now very close, and all five Nordic countries in the top 10.” By contrast my home country, the United States ranks a distant 23rd on the list. (Update posted March 19, 2024.)