How to Fail at Being Finnish

An introduction in 9 points

My wife, Silja, was the second Finnish person I ever met.

She was on holiday in London when it happened. Being the small-town Finn that she is and not knowing any better, she and her friends decided to visit a bar called The Dolphin. If you aren’t familiar with the seedier bars of East London, then let me tell you that The Dolphin is not the most likely destination for the beginnings of a heart-warming love story. Tales from The Dolphin, in contrast, are more likely to include sex in the filthy toilets, bad karaoke, and faces being smashed in with bottles of Stella. My excuse for being there was, well, I had a low bar for the quality of drinking establishment I frequented back then, and it was close to where I lived.

We were both, to varying degrees I admit, out of place.

I was working at a sports charity in West London at the time. An incredibly “worthy” corporate social responsibility outfit for a large car manufacturer you have definitely heard of. My main responsibilities included backcombing my hair and convincing my aging corporate superiors that I had some kind of mystical insight into youth culture on account of my being born in the Eighties.

Incredibly, being born in the Eighties made you young once upon a time, you know.

One day my boss was either ill or feeling the effects of his liquid lunch too severely and I was called on to travel to a frighteningly exclusive hotel near Green Park in Central London to interview one of the charity ambassadors for the website. In the years that followed, I’d end up doing a lot of this. And I think eventually I got pretty good at it. But on my first attempt, all my cockiness and self-assurance rapidly drained away in the presence of a real person. A person I’d seen on television. A person who had actually achieved something in life greater than having, what I considered at the time, excellent taste in skinny jeans and emo hair-styles.

That person was 1998 and 1999 Formula 1 World Champion racing driver Mika Häkkinen. The first Finn I ever met.

And the Finnish racing legend couldn’t have been nicer. He answered with surprising enthusiasm my mundane and hastily assembled questions. He didn’t even make a point of how clearly they demonstrated my infinitesimally small knowledge of motor racing. He even feigned interest enough in me to make some curious jokes about his wife and British people.

I think about that afternoon with Mika occasionally. How odd it was to be so perfectly unaware another Finn would change my life entirely within a matter of weeks. How odd that, a decade on, I could even ask Mika a few of those shitty questions in his native language now.

In late 2020, a few months after I moved with my family to Finland, I started keeping a diary for the first time. I wanted to document my journey learning the language most of all. After a few months, however, I went back to the first page and added a title. That title was How to Fail at Being Finnish.

I called it that because the diary had started to detail the many differences between the people I was surrounded by and what I was used to in Britain. I wanted to record how their different “Finnish” ways of doing things, once I’d started to take them on board for myself, were helping me in my life. Helping me, to put it simply, be happier, more content, less anxious even.

Eventually I worked those diary entries into a collection of essays. A collection that tells the story of my first year in Finland, learning Finnish, and coming to understand very Finnish habits and perspectives.

Since it’s my first diversion here from “food writing”, I plan to share these How to Fail at Being Finnish essays with paid subscribers. So, if you're interested in reading about the time I had a naked sauna with my regional state chief of police or the time I accidentally propositioned the local museum curator while flexing my nascent Finnish language skills, then I hope you upgrade today.

But this week, for everyone, I thought I’d share a kind of introduction to the things I’ve learned about Finnishness. In the spirit of my very up and down journey toward understanding life and people in my new(ish) home, listed below are the most obvious ways to fail at being Finnish, as I see them, so you can avoid them.

How to Fail at Being Finnish - an introduction in 9 points

1 - Always compliment your mother in law’s food

I remember the very first meal I had with Silja’s family for the delicious blue cheese-filled meatballs and how painfully silent it was. I was particularly disorientated by the lack of superlative compliments being directed toward Silja’s mother regarding the food. This, being the product of a typically British childhood structured by rigorous adherence to vocalised gratitude, struck me as impossibly strange. Rapid and frequent compliments for all and everything provided to me, particularly at a dinner table, was like an involuntary reaction. It’s just good manners, right? In Finland, no such conditioning seemed to exist. I would eventually learn that what looked like “bad manners” or a lack of gratitude through my British cultural gaze was actually anything but. It was my first insight into a very different set of social rules that Finland would end up teaching me.

2 - Never keep your distance at bus stops

I admit that first point feeds into the boring stereotype that Finns are only ever quiet, reserved, and not fans of small talk. Anyone who has witnessed Finns on Midsummer or after a national hockey team win know that it isn’t always the case. But it is often the case. And as well as not being all that bothered with extraneous pleasantries, compliments, and chit chat, personal space is very important. If you’re ever at a bus stop, leave plenty of space between you and the person in front.

3 - Think positive

Having been named “Happiest Country in the World” yet again this year, I wrote here about why Finns might be considered such happy people. A big part of it, I believe, is a reluctance to engage too actively in “positive thinking”. That isn’t to say Finns think negatively. Both thinking negatively and thinking positively are, after all, structurally identical; both involving guess work about how the future might end up. In my experience, that’s just not how Finns tend to see things, as the following point explains…

4 - Always have one eye on tomorrow

Tomorrow is the great unopened packet of Pokemon cards. Any promises for what’s coming are guesswork. At their worst, any such promises could even end up lies. This is why I think Finns tend not to say things like “oh, it will be alright in the end” or “I’m sure things will be fine.” Maybe, after all, it won’t end up alright. What then? Honesty is too important to Finns for that. It factors too much into cultural norms and behaviour here. That’s why focusing on the present is so important to life here, not what might be tomorrow. We can only know today, and, in as much, only today can be true.

5 - Stay away from the forest

Despite the endless mosquitoes, the branches cracking into faces, the remorsefully stuffy heat, I’ve never seen anyone more at home than my father in law foraging for mushrooms on a summer’s day in a thick Finnish forest. Being comfortable out in the wild is natural to Finns from all walks of life. It is totally normal, when the opportunity arises, to forage mushrooms, berries, and to fish. My mother in law, a city-living nurse for all her working life, also has an encyclopedic knowledge of wild mushrooms. She inherited it, so I'm told, from her mother. This connection to the wild just seems like a given to people here, like my ability to navigate the subway system in London. Here’s another way of putting it: what is called “wild swimming” in the UK, is just swimming here in Finland.

The tidiest Finnish forest I’ve ever seen.

6 - Never take a beer into a sauna

Not all Finnish inventions are an unqualified success. Much as I’ve acquired the taste for mämmi, I’m not sure everyone could, nor would want to. And I still think the weird salty licorice they love here tastes like fermented batteries. But I will, however, always be grateful for sauna. After a 10 hour shift in the restaurant, a sauna seems to cure me of all aches. I often chuckle at these male “wellness” gurus who seem terrified of seed oils and evangelise the use of ice baths, but when they occasionally champion the use of sauna, I have to agree. And there’s nothing better than a sauna with a beer. And the good news for those that don’t drink beer is that drinking it isn’t even the point. The best sauna experience comes from mixing a splash of the beer with the hot water and only then throwing it on the rocks. The steam fills the sauna with the smell of roasted bread and golden pastries and might be my favourite thing in the world.

7 - Always tell the people you love that you love them

In all the years I’ve known them, I’ve never heard my Finnish family, my wife and mother in law and so on, say I love you to each other. Like the (missing) compliments at the dinner table, this made no sense to me once upon a time. I grew up in a home that shared words of love countless times every day. I can’t explain this difference, though I would wager it’s to do with the fact that words are a little less important to Finns than the people I grew up with. But I can talk about the impact this has had on me. Having lived with this hesitance to say the words, I’ve reflected on my own use (and overuse) of them as well. Am I ever guilty of saying “I love you” because it’s easier than showing that love? Than acting on the love I feel? I hate the idea that I might ever be guilty of that. And so I have tried to stop saying it so much myself, instead focusing on showing that love through the things I do. Earning the right to say “I love you”. No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with saying the words. But, surrounded by this different way of loving in Finland, I am working on relying less on the words alone.

8 - Bail on that coffee you promised a friend

It often comes down to honesty with Finns. You don’t promise good things will happen to yourself, nor bad things, and you don’t promise things to other people unless you really know you can follow through with it. A promise of a future meet up is often a polite way of ending a conversation where I grew up bumping into friends in London. For a Finn, the suggestion of a coffee next week means it is very much going to happen.

9 - Always look for happiness

My favourite Finnish idiom is, translated best I can, “Happiness doesn’t come from searching, only by living.” I think it sums up so well what I’ve come to learn, and am still learning, about being a little bit more Finnish. It means living in the moment, not searching, wishing for things in the future. It means enjoying fully the things and people around you, focussing on them and not denying them the portion of yourself that might be lost to past regret or future fear. To me, that idiom is an aspiration toward honesty with oneself that any fears of tomorrow are lies, things that might never be. All that matters are the things you can take action on today, the here and now.

That’s the only place happiness lives.

My happy place. Writing in the summer on an island off the coast of west Finland.

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Thanks for taking time to read about my experience of life in Finland and what I’ve been learning here. If you’re interested in reading my How to Fail at Being Finnish essays, full of personal stories that bring these lessons to life, upgrade to a paid subscription today.

See you next week for a little peek into a “typical” Finnish Midsummer.

Wil