In recent years it’s become a hackneyed truism that Nordic nations have found the key to happiness. The Danes, who often take first place in global rankings for mental wellbeing, pride themselves on hygge, that feeling of cosiness evoked by wrapping oneself in blankets and being surrounded by candles. The Swedes promote lagom, the concept of the optimal medium. And while the Finns also appear to be satisfied with their lot – Finland came first in this year’s World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row – they have no well-known term that encapsulates their attitude to life.
In the spirit of Nordic oneupmanship, however, that could be about to change. Two Finnish film producers have announced they will open a ‘Finnish happiness experience museum’ in Helsinki next year to explore how they are happier than their Scandinavian neighbours – and why. The reason, it transpires, is because the Finns accept that life is tough.
One of the museum’s curators, Johannes Lassila, believes that this ostensibly curious paradox – that the Finns are content because they know that existence is an ordeal – manifests itself in the behaviour of the Finnish people. ‘If you imagine Finland as a Shangri-La, and then come here and stand here in the central square in November, you will be struck that nobody is smiling,’ Lassila told the Times at the weekend.
This outward appearance doesn’t betray deep-rooted misery, however, but merely a laconic, introverted and at times painfully shy temperament. ‘The Finns are not afraid of the Russians,’ says Miikko Oikkonen, the museum’s other co-creator. ‘They are afraid of having to accidentally spend time in the lift with their neighbours.’
Oikkonen’s comments aside, perhaps having the Russian bear on their doorstep has been a factor in shaping the Finnish character. Finland’s struggle for liberation from Tsarist Russia – and its hard-fought success in repelling the Soviet Union’s invasion in the second world war – helped to forge a sense of toughness and togetherness in a country that still remains homogenous. That, combined with its unforgiving climate and long winters, Lassila says, have all combined to nurture a mentality which faces up to the fact that life is bleak.
Yet even before the museum’s opening, the Finnish approach is belatedly beginning to gain wider recognition. While the unshowy Finns have been reluctant to promote or market themselves, it’s taken a Baltic neighbour to give a name to their winning mindset. One German newspaper recently praised Finland’s gift for Realitätsbewältigung: the ability to look reality in the face and master it.
The Finns are content because they know that existence is an ordeal
It’s fitting that it has been left to the Germans to give this approach a moniker. Germany, after all, is the nation that gave us Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the two 19th-century philosophers who articulated that life was essentially an unhappy affair via diametrically opposed methods.
Schopenhauer essentially believed that the way to deal with the horror of existence was to accept it: retreat from engagement with the physical world as much as possible and seek escape through music. Nietzsche, meanwhile, was initially a disciple of Schopenhauer but eventually came to the opposite conclusion. While he accepted that life mostly consists of struggle and disappointment (being a perpetually sick, nearly blind, virtually friendless and failed writer in his lifetime, Nietzsche knew all about such matters), he said we should embrace adversity to overcome it.
Rather than take flight from life’s awfulness, or negate this world and its pleasures through asceticism, Nietzsche exhorted his readers to be tough so as to triumph over suffering and sorrow. His philosophy is encapsulated in his famous maxim: ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.’ In other words, don’t wallow in dejection occasioned by rejection. Or, to be more glib, don’t get mad – get even.
This is why Nietzsche proposed that we shouldn’t avoid pain. We should grasp difficulties head-on. We shouldn’t strive for safety or bland happiness, or think happiness is a goal to be pursued. Rather, happiness is the consequence of the efforts we make: ‘There is no striving for pleasure, rather, pleasure occurs when we attain that which we strive for; pleasure is an accompaniment, not a motivation.’
The Finns seem to have stumbled on a truth known by Nietzsche and one known before him by the Stoics. And, while Realitätsbewältigung doesn’t so easily trip off the tongue, maybe the Finns have an equivalent word: one they could use to divulge the real key to happiness to the world.
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