It's a stock bit of news filler currently showing up all over the various newsfeeds: the people of Finland, or at least the ones who respond to surveys, are the happiest people on Earth.
There may be happier people on the planet, but they're not picking up the phone or, more likely, they haven't got telephones. Or the Internet.
Finns I have known -- nearly all of them "black Finns," which is to say dark of hair and eye and with a different set of ancestors than the stereotypical Scandinavian -- were taciturn, hard-working, focused people, most with a great love of caffeine. But the sample size is too small to extrapolate from.
An acquaintance who spent some time in the country, learning about an industrial automation system his employer had purchased, found the people he met to mostly be fine folk, good to know and fun to be around -- and reported most of them drank more than anyone he had ever met; and he was no slouch at that activity himself. So possibly that's it, and we're all going to be very sorry if happy Finland ever quits drinking and wakes up grumpy with a hangover.
This theory does account for their ferocity in the Winter War with the Soviet Union, booze supplies being somewhat irregular during wartime.
Of course, there's no reason at all to assume happiness is incompatible with ferocity; the two can get along swimmingly. That might be the most frightening thought of all. I'm sure glad they're on our side.
A Finnish quip from the WWI invasion by Russia: So many of them, so few of us...how will we bury them all?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.americanrifleman.org/content/where-will-we-bury-them-all-finnish-arms-of-the-winter-war/
They stay free, in part, because their language has something like fifteen noun cases and a gazillion verb conjugations, so nobody from another country can understand them.
ReplyDeletePerhaps happiness is incompatible with phones and/or Internet?
ReplyDelete