Only slightly bent

It’s time to note down some cultural impressions I’ve made about Australia; in particular, I will focus on a few things which strike me as somehow strange. Just to clarify, I treat these mainly as rhetorical questions as the reasons are clear enough for most of them.

Isn’t it strange..

• .. that Australia has the biggest houses in the world^[1], while simultaneously being the country that most increases the time spent outdoors for expats?^{[2, 3]} With a culture geared towards the outdoors life and a climate to match, why would people need the biggest indoor dwellings in the world?

• .. that Australia has one of the best solar power generation potential in the world^[4], yet produces over 80% of its electricity with coal?^[5]

• .. that Australia have some of the best-managed and sustainable fisheries in the world^{[6, 7]}, plenty of fresh produce and even wine locally available – i.e. a good potential for an ideal Mediterranean diet – but Australians are still among the most obese (if not the most obese) people in the world? ^{[8, 9]}

• .. that people in Australia are generally friendlier and more willing to help (my subjective experience, of course) than in Finland, despite Finland scoring quite a bit lower on the Hofstede’s individuality index?^[10]

• .. that people consider USA the great “melting pot”, even though only 11% of people in the USA are foreign-born, compared to over 25% in Australia?^{[11, 12]}

Resources

1. Australians live in worlds biggest houses
2. HSBC: Expat Survey
3. HSBC: Offshore offspring
4. Desertec Foundation: Australia’s Concentrating Solar Power Potential
5. Australian Coal Association: Electricity Production
6. Marine Stewardship Council: Certified fisheries
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: Fisheries resource management
8. Stewart, S: Australia’s Future ‘Fat Bomb’
9. NationMaster: Obesity Statistics
10. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: Finland and Australia
11. US Census Bureau: State & Country QuickFacts
12. Australian Bureau of statistics: Over one quarter of Australians were born overseas

Most of the things that come into your mind when you hear the word “segregation” have a negative connotation; racial segregation for one has caused much unnecessary misery over the long history of that idiotic behavior. Gender segregation, separation or discrimination is another stupid policy, with lots of dysfunctional societies to show for that. And there are many more.

But we have none of that in Finland. Right? Something that, for a long time, was claimed to be a particularly wonderful and cherished feature of Finland was that the whole society was very much on the same level. Income differences were small and there were no “good” or “bad” areas to live. It was all one big happy family – if somewhat poor, uniform and a bit of an alcoholic one, but one family with a single set of values anyway.

Or so we wanted everyone to believe – not least Finns themselves. Since that illusion was at its strongest, income differences have risen in the past couple of decades and there are the occasional calls that the society is getting too split between the rich and the poor. And no matter what people say of East Helsinki not being a worse area to live in than other areas in the metropolitan area, by many standards it is. There are big differences in the housing prices among different neighborhoods, and there are actual, real-life reasons for that.

Let’s just say that the reasons are not all about distance from downtown or related to building quality and leave it at that.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I don’t want a society where the rich are isolated from the poor. I don’t want to live in a gated community with armed guards, able to only drive out in a huge SUV and feel safe to roam only at my exclusive club, which is what actually happens in some places around the world. No.

But I do want to get rid of – or be separated from – the people whose behavior is a menace to society. Not only the murderers et al but I also want to get rid of those literally blowing smoke in my face, leaving dirty needles around to stumble upon, the parasites who refuse to work but would rather live on social support off of my taxes, spending their lives in a drunken haze shouting at passers-by. First help them. If that fails, force some help on them. If they insist on continuing behavior that is promoting breaking down a society instead of building upon it, I’d rather they do it amongst themselves. Why would any society need to continue to support elements that are, in one way or another, actively acting against it?

All this may make me sound like an elitist *uck who’s totally detached from the realities of life. Let me assure you that’s not the case. I’m not advocating a prison-world, an Orwellian Big Brother-nation where civil liberties and freedom are stifled or a paradise where everyone lives happily ever after. No. And I’m also painfully aware that most people in the world are struggling with much bigger problems than is the topic of this post.

All I want is a world – or, lacking that, just a limited area of the world – where I can walk around peacefully without being harassed, enjoy the evening on my balcony without being surrounded by cancerous smoke, go to the local store without pinching my nose shut because the alcoholics came to get their daily fix of booze, play and walk at the beach and the parks without the fear of infected needles, have my daughter enjoy life without the fear of being assaulted verbally or physically…

Is that too much to ask for in todays world? Or is it just too much to ask for in Finland?

If – and it seems when – there are people who are happy to live their lives in a manner that disturbs and hurts other people, should we allow them to do that? Yes, in fact, we should. But only if we make sure the only people they hurt are the ones that share their values, or the lack thereof.

Now then, what would be the best realistic way of accomplishing this goal of (a more) peaceful, healthy & safe living nowadays? Since higher education goes, on average, hand in hand with taking better care of yourself and leading a healthier life, the best way to do that is to live in an area with lots of other highly educated people. If education also happens to go hand in hand with higher incomes and thus leads to socioeconomically divided neighborhoods, so be it. See if I care. If we can’t get people to behave in Finland, I for one would welcome a class society – but one based on behavior, not family ties, income or social status – with open arms.

Mind you, Finland is still one of the most equal countries in the world by design. I don’t know if it’s the reason for that or a corollary from that, but the people here cannot handle the inequality as well as many other nations, seeing someone better off (whether the target really is better of in reality or only in the beholders imagination) more as a target of hatred, jealousy and sabotage than an inspiring example to strive for.

If an American sees his neighbor has bought a cool new car he’d also want to have, his first thoughts are likely to be along the lines of “Cool car, I want one too – so I’m going to work even harder to get that.” If a Finn sees his neighbor with a cool new car, the likely first instinct is to “accidentally” scratch it with his key.

Which is a healthier approach?

What we need is to extend the No Asshole Rule from corporations to the society.

Frozen Grand Central (see video here) was one of the greatest flash mob moments ever. Wicked cool. So cool in fact that everyone obviously had to copy it. Nothing wrong with that of course, as still most people have no idea what flash mobs are and so forth..

Anyhow, today was Helsinki Freeze and I was there. It was a modest success, despite some pretty serious problems with the execution. Namely:

• The time, place and function got leaked to the media way in advance, and in a way that made them write an article about it before the fact. That sucks. If the traditional media has to be informed – not a bad thing as such – make it so that they don’t write a story beforehand.
• There were more spectators photographing and ogling at the event than there were participants. It was like a theater for crying out loud.
• The participants were wandering around and on the scene too much before the designated time. People should enter from random directions only just before the critical moment. As most Finns are, well, not very animated to begin with, the whole scene looked semi-frozen for a long time beforehand.
• There were too many participants – if you look at the videos, the ratio of passers-by and participants was something like 1-to-9. However, this is actually a positive problem and just means the venue was too small.

Overall, flash mobs should be executed as they were in NYC; first gather the participants – and only the participants – in a park or somewhere shortly before the event. Announce the event only there, so word on what’s going to happen doesn’t leak out. Then set out on the task. A few designated people will shoot the event.

Anyhow, thanks to all the real participants! Great to see this stuff happening here, too, but let’s execute the next one a bit better.

Links:

• What is a flash mob? Wikipedia entry.
• Improv Everywhere
• Flashmob Helsinki Facebook Group
• Check out some stories & videos of the Helsinki Freeze event; Nelonen was clever enough to include even me: Hesari, Nelonen, Youtube #1, Youtube #2, Youtube #3

A few days ago, I added another bookmark to my browser – I now have 5,473 bookmarks. As can be expected, I never visit most of the sites after bookmarking them, but at least hoarding bookmarks has no negative environmental impact other than me facing an impossible task of managing & organizing them “when I have the time”. (BTW, del.icio.us doesn’t help; it crashes when I try to import my massive file)

Anyhow, this latest bookmarked site is an interesting organization with a nice goal and fascinating studies: The Australia Institute. Their philosophy leans a little left but rings very true:

Private markets, while effective at encouraging efficiency in many circumstances, frequently fail to reflect adequately the ethical, social and environmental priorities of the community. Governments must provide the appropriate institutional framework in which private markets operate so as to ensure that they contribute to justice, equity and sustainability as well as efficiency. Market outcomes are not value free and the Institute reasserts the place of ethics in making public and private decisions.

While the institute is very active in issues relating to climate change and renewable energy, what caught my eye now was a paper called “Stuff happens: Unused things cluttering up our homes.“ It’s one interesting study – and one that is probably applicable to most or all western cultures – of a phenomenon that I believe most of us are to some extent familiar with: we have too much stuff in our homes. Stuff we never use. Stuff we’d be better off without.

There’s even a cute categorization of this clutter:

Emotional clutter – things with sentimental meaning but little financial value –
including children’s toys or drawings, (unused or unwanted) gifts, school or
university notes, and personal possessions of absent loved ones;

Just-in-case clutter – things with little or no sentimental value but that ‘might
come in handy one day’ and that are therefore kept for some time, such as old
bills or bank statements, tools and stationery;

Bought clutter – impulse purchases, often acquired recently, that end up never
being used, commonly including clothes, fashion accessories and books;

Bargain clutter – free or very cheap things acquired at sales, from friends or
family or ‘by the side of the road’ which are discarded only reluctantly
because they were so cheap

What’s interesting is that even though 66% of people agree with the statement “It makes me feel better when I get rid of some of the clutter in my home”, 88% of homes still have at least one room that is cluttered. For many Finns, the “kellarikomero” (a basement closet, sort of a storage space in apartment buildings) is one of the worst clutter dumps. We take stuff there, but we never take stuff out of there. Often they’re treated like miniature black holes.

It’s all stuff that someone could probably use and we still hold on to it. As the report points out, “spending money is now, strangely, its own form of entertainment” and even I confess to sometimes resorting to retail therapy. Why is that? It must be because all that stuff somehow matters to us, even if we never use it.

And it does. The respected State of the World report this year included a chapter on sustainable lifestyles that nicely ties in with the topic at hand. It goes on to explain that:

For a start, it is immediately clear that consumption goes way beyond just satisfying physical or physiological needs for food, shelter, and so on. Material goods are deeply implicated in individuals’ psychological and social lives. People create and maintain identities using material things.
[...]
People narrate the story of their lives through stuff. They cement relationships to others with consumer artefacts. They use consumption practices to show their allegiance to certain social groups and to distinguish themselves from others.

It may seem strange at first to find that simple stuff can have such power over emotional and social lives. And yet this ability of human beings to imbue raw stuff with symbolic meaning has been identified by anthropologists in every society for which records exist. Matter matters to people. And not just in material ways. The symbolic role of mere stuff is borne out in countless familiar examples: a wedding dress, a child’s first teddy bear, a rose-covered cottage by the sea. The “evocative power” of material things facilitates a range of complex, deeply ingrained “social conversations” about status, identity, social cohesion, and the pursuit of personal and cultural meaning.

This is all quite understandable. As one of the study respondents noted, “No one’s gonna spot you across the other side of a crowded room and say: ‘Wow! Nice personality!” But do we have to consume at the current levels to be happy? No, we don’t – and we can’t. It’s painfully clear that the world simply cannot support our “western-level” consumption levels on a global scale – we’re already consuming much more than is sustainably possible as it is. And so we enter the paradox of well-being. But if consuming makes people happy and we specifically want to consume to get physical “stuff”, is there any hope of a change in time?

There is such a thing as sustainable consumption – and there’s also such a thing called diminishing returns, luckily also in terms of consumption. The following graph (from the State of the World report) shows that while money does bring happiness to some extent, its effects soon wear off after certain threshold – after reaching a modest level of income, collective happiness does not increase with income. This, in itself, is not news. But how could we slowly converge the world towards the “happy-but-not-extravagantly-rich” middle ground of sustainable consumption?

The same thought is echoed in the report:

The paradox of well-being begs the question, Why do people continue to consume? Why not earn less, spend less, and have more time for families and friends? Couldn’t people live better—and more equitably—this way and at the same time reduce humanity’s impact on the environment?

Doing so is called downshifting and it’s actually happening – to such an extent that several studies have been made of it:

The downshifting movement now has a surprising allegiance across a number of industrial economies. A recent survey in Australia found that 23 percent of respondents had engaged in some form of downshifting in the preceding five years. A staggering 83 percent felt that Australians are too materialistic. An earlier study in the United States found that 28 percent of those surveyed had taken some steps to simplify and 62 percent expressed a willingness to do so. Very similar results have been found in Europe.

Research on the success of these initiatives is quite limited, but existing studies show that simplifiers really have less materialistic values and show greater respect for the environment and for others. More important, simplifiers appear to show a small but significant increase in subjective well-being. Consuming less, voluntarily, can improve well-being—completely contrary to the conventional model

So perhaps there is some hope.

Links:

• The Australia Institute
• TAI Report: Stuff happens: Unused things cluttering up our homes.
• The WorldWatch Institute
• WorldWatch: State of the World 2008 (ToC)
• WorldWatch: State of the World 2008, Chapter 4. The Challenges of Sustainable Lifestyles
• TAI Report: Downshifting in Australia: A sea-change in the pursuit of happiness

I would claim that by and large, professionals are no longer valued. This development is by no means limited to any one walk of life, but is highly visible to everyone in places like retail sales and customer service. Primarily the experts are not valued by the employers (i.e. they’re not willing to pay for expertise as witnessed by the recent Circuit City incident), but the real fault is with the customers who apparently don’t demand good service.

I’m most likely hopelessly old-fashioned because in addition to shopping on the ‘net, I love visiting actual, good-quality, physical stores and shopping there. What’s more, I assume a person should know the product(s) they are selling. But visiting a store isn’t always a pleasant experience, and that’s the part that makes me sad – and drives me to do more of my shopping online. Some of biggest problems are poor attitude and aptitude:

• Lack of knowledge is probably the single biggest issue; like I said, in my books, a salesperson or a customer service rep should know the product they’re selling or representing. Yet, 90% of them don’t seem to know $hit – if you ask even the simplest question, their first source of information is to look at the product tag or the box or whatever. Ask something more complicated and you’ll either get a BS answer or no answer at all. Any idiot could tell you the same stuff – or more – after spending three minutes with the product box.

• Customer discrimination. Try going to a jeweler dressed in shorts and a t-shirt in the US; you’re usually treated just like everyone else, professionally and with dignity. This is because any weirdo in a ragged t-shirt is a potential billionaire. Try the same in Finland and you get sized up immediately and categorized as a persona non grata in the store – and it shows from the service, or the lack of it. In many places even good appearance doesn’t help – you still get treated in a demeaning manner. Apparently many stores here make so much money that they don’t really need customers. I find that a bit strange. Maybe we need more eccentric millionaires here.

• Ignoring the customer. It can be hard to completely ignore somebody when you’re dealing with them face-to-face, but salespeople in Finland often pull that off pretty well.
   

  Online, however, ignorance is remarkably easy. You just delete the incoming e-mail or whatever and forget about it. Maybe that’s why in many places it’s the norm to never reply anybody to anything. Be it an offer, request for information, job application, complaint or praise, it’s considered “normal” to completely ignore the contacting party. This, of course, is far from polite, normal behavior. Or so I like to think, which is why many companies and organizations have ended up on my mental black list. Of course there are positive exceptions, too – for example, Helsingin Sanomat usually responds quickly and lately the City of Helsinki Rescue Department also impressed me by their thorough and quick replies to some inquiries.

• Making customers wait is another way of saying they’re not really appreciated; in this sector, mobile operators and banks seem to be the worst culprits.

• You get what you pay for and people don’t want to pay for quality. This obviously has more to do with customers than merchants, but it goes under the same category anyway – that professional, well-made products just aren’t appreciated.

So why does this happen? Why is such lame service so prevalent? I can only come to the conclusion that most people don’t care about customer service or quality in any of its forms. People want stuff cheaply and they’ll not only tolerate substandard goods because of that, but also like to be treated like idiots and waste hours of hours of their own time dealing with the problems ensuing from poor quality.

I find all of this really, really baffling. To top it off, we have these morons who find the rare knowledgeable store, go ask them a zillion questions, play with their products at the store, choose the one they want – and then buy it from the cheapest place online! What a cute way of stealing their expertise just because they’re too lazy to do the research themselves. And I don’t even run a store, so I can only imagine how annoyed the merchants themselves are who get ripped off like this.

And NO, I don’t mean buying online is bad. Heck, I buy most of my books and stuff online and online shopping is great provided you have time and energy to study whatever it is you’re buying long enough to make an informed decision. But I don’t go to the stores asking questions about expensive products if I don’t intend to buy them from there provided the experience is good.

So thanks to the lazy, ungrateful cheapskates the selection of good-quality brick-and-mortar merchants is decreasing for those who would appreciate them.

Many people will tell you that the Finnish summer is all about summer cottages and sauna, preferably by a lake or sea. In fact, people will go as far as to tell you that the essence of being Finnish has a lot to do with summer cottages and sauna and, of course, a beer or two. Or three.

Anyhow, it’s worth noting that this is a stereotype. I for one, though I’m 100% a summer-person, am not really a summer cottage-sort of a person. A couple of days every couple of years is what it takes to fulfill my summer-cottage quota. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy nature, the sea or even sauna. But a sauna by the sea need not be either in the middle of nowhere or something you own; neither does the uncrowded nature need to be a chunk of mosquito-infested forest you have.

Luckily, as I’ve written before, Helsinki presents great opportunities to enjoy nature right near the city. Pihlajasaari is one such place, a wonderful recreation island a short 10-minute boat ride from downtown Helsinki. As chance would have it, the photos in this post are all from Pihlajasaari; in addition to some sandy beaches, it has more natural Finnish type of a rocky beach area – below left – and some fun locker rooms, below right.

Pihlajasaari also has some old structures, presumably from the WW II period. Below left is a view of Lauttasaari peering through a hole in an old wall. Below right is the sea view in a more natural state, depicting a very Finnish coastal area at its best; though I much prefer sandy beaches, there’s something to be said for the aesthetic qualities of smooth rock beaches also.