It's really an article about Finnish sisu - which, having lived in Finland, I can tell you with 100% certainty that the rest of the world should cultivate some of. It's not very long or very much in-depth, but well worth a read.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
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Being a Finn I can say 99% of any talk related to sisu is absolute garbage or telling legends about the Winter War.
Modern day Finns are pathetic fucks and not some psychologically durable machines who don't feel emotions.
People only care about themselves and their own. Fuck everything else.
Finland doesn't even believe in personal rights, nor mental illness, for that matter.
Genuinely one of the worst countries by a certain metric. Rulewhoring. Worrying amounts of authoritarianism.
Edit oh and I see you downvoting me, fellow Finns. But like I've said, you're cowards and none of you will actually engage me in this because you know I'm right and the fact that I am right is what is really getting to you, making you downvote without the ability to comment. In essence it's the very problem I'm complaining about. Selkärangattomat suomalaiset.
Today's generation of Finns may not have the resilience of their forebears - born out of the war and pre-Nokia poverty no doubt - but they do have something that's 1000% Finnish: they tend to accept their situation and silently power through it instead of trying to improve it. For me, that's what sisu really is.
That has advantages if the situation can't be improved: if a job is tedious and boring and there's nothing you can do about it, a Finn will grind through it when other nationalities would most likely bitch and moan. In those situations, the Finns will get amazing things done. But the flip side is, when the situation can be improved, the Finns don't even try to figure out if it can because their first reflex is to suck it up.
As for mental illness, it's true: the Finns do have quite a few issues. But to me, it's both the consequence of this ultra-fatalist approach to everything, and also the fact that most Finns don't know what they have because they don't know what other people don't have, because they don't travel much.
My usual advice to Finnish friends and colleagues who told me life sucked here was: go live in a few poor African or South American countries - hell, even the US now, to experience true fascism first hand - for 6 months to a year and come back: then you'll be glad to be alive and living here every morning.
So it just mean "submission"
There is an element of that, yes. But there's also a "Make the best of what you have" aspect to it. It's not as defeatist as you make it sound.
"they tend to accept their situation and silently power through it instead of trying to improve it."
Your description of the more pernicious elements of "sisu" reminds me of the "stiff upper lip" idea that's prevalent in British culture.
Tangentially, I'm reminded of research that shows how people who complain more live longer. One of the reasons for this is that complaining can be a necessary part of advocating for oneself, especially in a healthcare situation.
I share your frustration with people who miss obvious solutions because they don't try to figure out how things could be improved. I like fixing stuff, and I often leap at any opportunity to tangibly improve things in life — little things, like a door that slams loudly, or a wobbly chair. Sometimes I can't fix them, but most of the time, I can spend a trivial amount of energy and improve things. I suspect this instinct of mine is linked to the fact that I'm disabled, and thus there are many things in my life that suck that I can't improve or fix, so it gives me a sense of empowerment to fix what I can. I'm always a bit baffled by people shrugging and ignoring things that have super easy solutions.
I share your frustration with people who miss obvious solutions because they don’t try to figure out how things could be improved.
Obvious or not so obvious. Me,I will spend inordinate amounts of time coming up with solutions - even complex solutions - to not do any repetitive task more than once if I can. That's even my job at work: I design test equipment for production and I make it as automatic as possible, so that neither I nor the production engineers have to spend time doing the same thing over and over whenever possible.
It's a reflex for me: if I do something more than twice, I start thinking about how to automate it or arrange things so I don't have to do it again. The Finns I worked with for years almost never have that reflex: if whatever they have to do yields the results they want, it's good enough, even if some lateral thinking could get them to do less work.
I too am disabled (I'm a double partial foot amputee) and I applied that line of thinking to my own problem of finding proper footwear. For instance, instead of having to physically go for a fitting (which limits my choice of shoemakers to local ones) I made acrylic casts of my feet that I can ship to any shoemaker in the world, so they can fashion the shoes around copies of my actual feet. It's a surprisingly simple way to buy bespoke shoes that are guaranteed to fit without leaving the comfort of my living room 🙂 But funnily enough, nobody with special footwear needs seem to think of doing that.
just imagine what it would feel like to chew on your own fingers until you can produce enough blood to write 300 words in your own blood on the walls.
I was confused by the thumbnail. I thought it was a guy kissing some amorphous thing and I can't make out (pun intended) where his lips are.
I like that guy in adventure times tho
Newspaper just love to take "untranslatable"foreign word to make them sounds exotic.
Kinda like there's a word for "djihad". It's struggle. There's a word for "hugge". It's comfort. But it makes way less clics