The Real Deal Guide to Finnish Happiness (Ebook, instant PDF)

What Finns actually do and which bits work if you don't live in a forest.

Finland has been the happiest country on earth for nine years running and it does not look like cheering. It looks like a man alone on a jetty, delighted.

This is the guide to what he is actually doing. There are seven types, seven habits and one Brit getting all of it wrong first so you don't have to. You'll find out why a language with over sixty words for snow has none for please, what the sauna is actually for and why the happiest people on earth complain about a bus that is two minutes late. That last one turns out to be the explanation rather than the contradiction.

The seven types

• The No Niin Native finds happiness in a vocabulary nobody else can pronounce.
• The February Cyclist finds it on the far side of something unpleasant and is already halfway across.
• The Perkele Whisperer finds it in one word, said quietly and with real feeling.
• The Löyly Masochist finds it at eighty degrees and climbing, reaching for the ladle.
• The Mökki Vanisher finds it somewhere with no road to it.
• The Fluent in Silencer finds it about four seconds after everybody stops talking.
• The Pulla Diplomat finds it in a full pot and somebody else's bad day quietly getting better.

Every chapter ends with a section called How anyone can use this, and the book closes with an honest ledger of what transfers to your life and what needs a functioning welfare state. Half of Finnish happiness is citizenship and half of it is habit. Only one of those is available to you on Tuesday.

It's meant to be funny, useful and checkable. Every study is named on the page, from a twenty-year Finnish heart study to a laboratory that paid people to swear.

It runs to eighty-five pages, as a PDF you can read on any device, forever.