I recently read an article about Finland’s extraordinary run as the happiest country on earth, in which the author cited one key catalyst for their success: low expectations. The author argued that because the days are short and the nights are long, Finns don’t concern themselves with overachieving. I suppose after centuries of just trying to survive the frigid temperatures, accomplishing any task beyond survival seems like a major success. Hey, we survived the night—life is pretty good! But of course, there’s more to it than that.
I’m thinking the author oversimplified the Finnish mindset. After all, an entire country can’t have low ambition. Finnish people are everywhere kicking ass, making names for themselves. I can’t think of any off the top of my head just this second, but I know they won some medals in the Winter Olympics, and you can’t just lazily fall into that. That takes a lot of work. Unless, I suppose, the medals were in curling and a few Finlanders just randomly rolled off the couch one day and discovered they were curling prodigies. I’ll have to check.
American Obsession With Happiness
Contrary to Finlanders, us Americans do seem obsessed with happiness and big expectations. Our culture is one centered on accomplishment and having the “best” experiences possible. It’s rather exhausting, I think. That’s probably one reason I head to the mountains. American culture is a lot of noise that seems to me, much ado about nothing, and I need constant breaks from it. There’s so much discussion and worry about what we’re going to do next, that we spend too much time thinking and hoping, and not enough doing. Just look at what we do with the college process.
We ask kids stupid questions like, “what do you want to do with your life?” when as adults, we know that we are continuously evolving and that what we thought might be true for ourselves at eighteen was vastly different at twenty-eight… and thirty-eight… and forty-eight… But still, we ask the question, forcing kids to ponder, and unnecessarily stress about all the things they could do that they never thought about before. Some planning, like going to college, is of course beneficial, but when these conversations come up about what we expect out of life, I feel like a kid just needs to get a job—even a bad one—so that they can learn what they do and don’t want, without imagining it.
Trading Expectations for Movement
I don’t know if Finns really have low expectations for their lives, and I’m not saying we need to lower our life expectations, but I know for my own mental health, it helps to lower my daily expectations. Especially because I do have big life expectations.
There’s a lot I want to accomplish this year alone—bag a bunch of mountains, finish the book I’m working on, start writing another book and maybe finish that, and perhaps record audio versions of what I’ve written—but I obviously can’t complete all that today. And maybe I won’t be able to complete it all in the timeframe I have planned, but what I can do today is take the hardest challenge in front of me—whether that’s writing the next thousand words, paying my taxes, responding to a work emergency, handling something for one of my kids—and be satisfied that I have these problems to enjoy.
I can embrace the fact that no matter where I end up, I’m moving forward. That’s all I’ve got to do. Just move forward. Expectations be damned.