Why We Are the Way We Are

Everything below comes from Virtual Finland: People or The Finnish Way of Life.
It seems to be how it is, coming from four Finnish grandparents, three of them immigrants to the US before the 1900's.

I used to wonder why my matriarchal elders were so spotted. If you notice the second thing that makes Finns happy is sunny weather. None of us spent any time indoors when the sun was outside. Sunscreen in those days of wicked sunburns was a long sleeved shirt. I was 23 before I discovered I would never burn if I took the sun in small doses for a week or two. After that I could spend all day in it without burning. Now that I am well aged, I am spotted from my head to my toes just like my mummu, her sisters, and my mother and her sisters were.

It made us happy, almost as happy as cleaning house which is number six. I notice that He Who Must Be Obeyed doesn't get so happy over a clean house as I do; especially if he is the one pushing the vacuum cleaner and picking up the piles that accumulate around his favorite chair. But then he is a Norwegian and I am not certain just what makes them happy. Maybe nothing. I jump to that conclusion from spending time in the National Gallery in Oslo. There are some very grim paintings there.

So below is the happiness factors right off the Internet:

What makes a Finn Happy? "Very recently, one of our big circulation, middle-of-the-road popular magazines, entitled Seura, meaning roughly (good) company, commissioned a big survey to find out where happiness lies. The magazine used a wide sample of 1,015 individuals, who were each given 678 questions to answer. That produced a massive 688, 170 items of information. Well, I'm not a statistician so let's just get to the point, which is to set before you the Finnish nation's top ten happiness factors.

First on the list was home sweet home, a home of one's own - expressed in Finnish by the proverb "Your own home is as precious as gold." Then came the weather. This is not as surprising as it may seem, since Finland has four very distinct seasons, but one of them is too long. Thus, the second feel-good factor was sunny weather.

Now we move into the Finnish soul. It never takes long in a country where people on the whole lack a small-talk culture, but are ever ready to open a seminar on "Why are we here, where are we going?" So, happiness factor number three in the poll was an honest relationship, and number four was so closely related as to confuse the unwary. It was a trusting relationship. Number five reveals something of the Finn's innate independence of mind, and it is simply the freedom to be oneself. No mention yet of money or worldly possessions - apart from the initial roof over one's head.

Feelings beat materialism

No, instead of materialism we're in for more relationships, but not before number six, which is a freshly cleaned home. It would be truly interesting to have on hand a comparative survey covering countries both far from and near to each other. I wonder which ones would replicate the Seura people's replies from seven to ten, which were: friendship, gestures/words in a relationship, friendship, actions in a relationship, fidelity in a relationship and security in a relationship. The survey findings go on in much the same vein.

People are obviously content with simple, honest pleasures such as the smell of newly washed laundry, falling in love or walking in the countryside. The first direct reference to money appears at number nineteen and it is that great feeling: "there's more money in my account than I remembered".