That said Finland is a lovely country to move to. Raising a child here in particular has meant I really appreciate the support, and services/facilities available. From the daycares, onwards.
Sure the taxes are high, but when you have good public transport, good services, and so on it's hard to resent them too much.
This kind of comment is under appreciated. I don’t have any opinions on the OP, but I really hope that more people would start using statistics published by neutral third-parties, whenever someone puts out some news article, to either support or counter the information presented in the article they just read.
Suicide rates are also an imperfect metric. Suicide has a stigma, which can lead to misclassification as accidents and other types of underreporting. Also, some societies, like Finland, are much more open to the concept of euthanasia than others.
This happiness survey tells us something about people’s expectations for their own life, which is not completely without value.
Note that the scale is calibrated by what the respondent considers possible:
”Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
In some other countries, the bar for that personal “top of the ladder” is set extremely high by more visible income inequality and concepts like the American Dream which suggest that everyone could/should be a billionaire.
In Finland, a prevailing pessimism keeps expectations in check. (You can see examples of this pessimism in sibling comments here.) Good things are a happy surprise, not something you were promised.
Add things like
- Shitty climate, darkness for almost half a year and lousy snowless winters as of late.
- Dire economic situation, almost 1/5 of population facing the risk of poverty.
- Ever increasing cutting of social services, education and everything culture.
Makes you wonder how Finland can be the most content country in the world
In the news, everything is polarized and negative.
On the streets, in my anecdotal experience of 1, everyone is happy, friendly, and things are good. There is disagreement but tolerance about politics, and in most cases a assumption of "not bad" faith.
My high school principal once told me - you cannot be happy, nor by extension do anything productive, within 1 hour of reading the news.
I don't own a smartphone, and I suspect that has to do with my narrow experience. But, I really wonder how much the various media outlets are negatively shaping reality.
Good read,well done journalism mixed with influencesce travelog observations, personal discovery, and a few deeply British funny bits.
Lucky for me my browser ignores pay walls,while there are no pictures,sometimes the writing is
evocative enough to make them redundent.
I can't stand the conflation of "satisfied" and "happy." It's insane. There is more happiness in one Zimbabwean (country "happiness" rank: 143) than in one hundred Icelanders (country "happiness" rank: 2, worldwide antidepressant consumption rank: 1.) Go stand in a crowd of people and count the fucking smiles and the fucking laughter.
It is all part of this broader wave of newspeak. If you can quite literally redefine happiness, you can redefine anything. Nothing has meaning anymore. You will live alone, you will consume antidepressants, you will be protected from the sunlight, you will not smile, you will not laugh, and you will be happy.
Finland sits about middle in the EU on suicide rates.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/e...