I’ve always been quick to adapt to different surroundings and different places. I can call a hotel “home” after spending two nights there. I make it a point to learn my way around and try to blend in to some extent, no matter how short a time I might be staying somewhere. But that is the concept of a home on a smaller, easier scale. It’s easy to find and build a home like that – what’s more difficult is finding the right city, country and most of all, culture, to place it in.
One would think I’d consider Finland my home. And I do, a lot of the time. However, at other times Finland, where I’ve lived for most of my life, feels very foreign. I walk among the people completely incognito, blended in, as one is supposed to. After all, that’s the ultimate test of belonging in Finland – successful cultural integration is being ignored, being just another sulky face walking purposefully and busily down the street – to nowhere special. No one can tell I don’t belong. Yet every person I don’t look in the eyes, every opportunity that I don’t smile at someone, every situation where I choose to remain silent instead of talking – conforming to all of the little things how Finns are supposed to act – feel like little stabs of something being wrong. Something that I shouldn’t but that I have to do.
Have to do? Why? Because whereas a culturally unadjusted (or just different) foreigner is usually understood and even tolerated to some extent, nothing draws fire like a Finn critical of Finland or unwilling to fit in. They are treated as anything from simple weirdos to unpatriotic traitors which they by no means usually are – but since when does rationality play any role in emotions? It’s just that the cultural dogma of uniformity and jealousy, the derogation and fear of anything different, the prohibition on being visibly happy (except from June to August), the political unwillingness to accept and tackle the real issues and the overt abuse of the legal drugs sometimes get to me.
Of course, most of the time I don’t think about it that much. Often I’m even downright happy to be living in Finland, a country that’s still far detached from most of the world’s disasters. Yet I know it’s mostly an illusion that we would be completely out of harm’s way; all it takes is, for example, a simple pandemic to prove it to everyone. It’s highly ironic to see some commentators being glad about e.g. climate change because it’s likely to make living and growing conditions better in Finland. As if we’re the winners or something. (In fact, there have been newspaper articles with that very title, “Finland a winner in climate change“) Do people not realize how interlinked the world already is? Read the “Made In”-tags of all the stuff you own to begin to grasp it. In a globalized world, climate change or any natural or manmade disaster produces no winners. There are only losers.
Since no country is all bliss and no pain, I wonder if this one could be changed to a happier, better, more rational nation. Just like this great despair.com demotivator reminds us of teamwork’s power, perhaps it also works the other way around; in a positive manner.
