Finland is the kind of place that makes you question whether society is actually broken everywhere else. It’s like someone figured out how to make life function smoothly, and then everyone just… agreed to go along with it. This is a country where things work not because people are terrified of consequences, but because it never occurred to them to cut corners in the first place.
Take public transport. If you step onto a bus in Helsinki, you just assume it will be on time, clean, and largely unpopulated by men aggressively arguing with their own hallucinations. In America, we have entire industries built around managing dysfunction—committees for road repair that never fix roads, bureaucracies designed to make public services as unintuitive as possible, entire government departments dedicated to teaching people how not to die of medical debt. Finland skips that part. It just runs things properly and then moves on with its day.
But what’s most unsettling about Finland isn’t how well it works. It’s that people don’t seem to think this is extraordinary. They aren’t walking around marveling at their own good fortune. They are just existing in it, as if living in a world without fear of medical bankruptcy or unregulated capitalism is the baseline expectation for civilization. Imagine being raised in a house where everyone was just naturally kind to each other. That’s Finland. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the concept of not having to worry about financial ruin every time you get a chest cold is filed under “utopian fantasy.”
Of course, all this stability comes at a cost, and that cost is a kind of existential placidity. Finland isn’t a country where things dramatically happen. It’s a country where things are efficiently managed. Crime is so low that people forget to lock their doors. There’s no real class divide because the tax system forcibly prevents one from forming. The most common political drama isn’t about some unhinged authoritarian trying to seize power—it’s about people calmly negotiating tax structures at a level of detail that would cause most Americans to lapse into a boredom-induced coma.
The Finns, for their part, are perfectly fine with this arrangement. They like things quiet. They don’t want to talk to strangers unless absolutely necessary. Their social contract is simple: I will leave you alone, and you will leave me alone, and together we will live in a perfectly functioning society where no one ever has to ask what the hell is wrong with the plumbing.
This is not to say Finland is a paradise. The darkness before winter is the kind of bleak, crushing void that makes you understand why Nordic crime fiction is so popular. The economy has its problems. The bureaucratic efficiency that makes the country so livable can also make it feel like a nation governed by a very polite AI. And yet, it remains a place where even the poorest people live in relative comfort—where the idea of extreme wealth inequality is considered not just immoral but vaguely embarrassing.
Most Finns, if pressed, wouldn’t trade their system for anything. Visit almost any other country and you’ll quickly see why. The idea of public medical care so reliable that even rich people use it? Unthinkable elsewhere. The concept of a functional welfare state that doesn’t devolve into bureaucratic nightmare fuel? Practically sci-fi. In America, if a government program actually works as intended, it’s usually treated as a statistical anomaly. In Finland, it’s just called “Tuesday.”
So what do you do with a country that has, for all practical purposes, figured things out? You enjoy it. You accept that life in Finland is built on the radical idea that society should not be a chaotic free-for-all where survival is a function of how good you are at navigating bureaucratic nonsense. You embrace the endless forests, the ice swimming, the high coffee consumption, and the strange but undeniable appeal of a summer nap in the park.
And if that ever starts to feel too predictable, just wait for winter. That’s when the darkness sets in, the existential dread creeps up, and the whole country collectively drinks itself into oblivion for a weekend. Because even in a perfectly functional society, some traditions must be maintained.
