The Real Deal Guide to Finnish Happiness

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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. Seven types, seven habits and one Brit getting all of it wrong first so you don't have to. Why a language with over sixty words for snow has none for please. What the sauna is actually for. Why the happiest people on earth complain about a bus that is two minutes late and why that is the explanation rather than the contradiction.

The seven types

• The No Niin Native. Happiness with a vocabulary nobody else can pronounce.
• The February Cyclist. Happiness on the far side of something unpleasant, already halfway across.
• The Perkele Whisperer. Happiness in one word, said quietly, with real feeling.
• The Löyly Masochist. Happiness at eighty degrees and climbing, reaching for the ladle.
• The Mökki Vanisher. Happiness somewhere with no road to it.
• The Fluent in Silencer. Happiness that starts about four seconds after everybody stops talking.
• The Pulla Diplomat. Happiness as 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.

Who wrote it

Joel Willans is the author of 101 Very Finnish Problems, now in its fifth edition, and More Very Finnish Problems, published by Gummerus. He has lived in Finland since 2002, married into the place, raised two Finnish children and still cannot roll an r. Very Finnish Problems reaches more than 1.3 million followers across six social channels.

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.

Eighty-five pages. A PDF you can read on anything, on any device, forever.

No niin.

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