Coherence in human societies arises from necessity and shared constraint. As systems grow more efficient and comfortable, meaning disperses into abstraction. What remains are rituals and memories that echo earlier unity. 

PART I: FOUNDATIONS 

Nail of the Sky

In the ancient Finnish worldview the world was a living structure. The land stretched beneath the cover of the sky, and from the earth rose a great pillar that connected to the Nail of the Sky, the northern star above. Beneath it lay the home of the dead. The world was not divided into the material and the spiritual but layered and continuous. Every movement above echoed below.

Before land there was water. The beginning of the world was imagined as a vast sea, endless and dark, where an egg floated and cracked open to give birth to land, sky, and life. Water was the source of all form, the substance from which order emerged. Later, in the Christian world, this same idea survived in baptism, where the individual passes through water to be born again. What had once been the cosmic origin became a symbol of moral purification. The act remained, but the meaning shifted from participation in nature’s cycle to mastery over it.

People once lived surrounded by powers that spoke through trees, stones, rivers, and wind. Words, songs, and poems were not decoration but tools. They could shape events, calm storms, heal, and curse. This was not yet technology but it carried the same intention, the attempt to influence reality, to mold the surrounding world with thought and voice. The spells and songs of the old people were the first gestures of control in a world that could not yet be engineered.

The Finnish world was concrete and symbolic at once. Rivers were not only water but paths to the realm of the dead. The west was the direction of both sunset and death. Fortune was a finite current that moved through families and villages, and if one house prospered another’s share diminished. The body too carried sacred meaning. The vagina was a gateway of creation, a mirror of the earth’s opening that gave birth to life. Life and death were never separated from the tangible world.

When Christianity arrived it brought another order. The world became abstract, governed by a distant creator who lived beyond the sky. The gods of place and thing were replaced by one god of hierarchy. The Finnish relationship to nature, built on intimacy and negotiation, was replaced by the idea of dominion. Nature was now to be tamed and used. What had once been alive became property.

This transformation reflected a broader change that had already begun further south. In the first cities of civilization the gods of neighboring peoples were merged to form a single unifying symbol. Monotheism was born not only as faith but as an instrument of administration. It allowed different groups to live under one rule, to obey one law, and to share one story. It was the first symbolic infrastructure of civilization.

In Finland this process came later, and because of that the older memory remained visible for longer. The songs, the sky, and the forest still carried meaning. Even the bogs were thresholds to the other world, places where one might descend and never return. The myths were maps of lived experience. The end of the world was imagined as the collapse of natural law, when the sun would lose its path and light things would sink while heavy things would rise. It was not a moral apocalypse but a physical one, a return to chaos.

The old world saw balance as sacred and disorder as death. The new world saw disorder as opportunity. The same will that once sang to the wind eventually learned to harness it. The same voice that called spirits into balance became the voice that commanded machines.

Between Fire and Fence

Before Finland became a nation, its people lived within a vast, continuous landscape stretching across what is now Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia. In these northern regions, life followed the rhythm of the forest. Families practiced slash and burn agriculture, clearing small areas of woodland for cultivation before moving on when the soil was exhausted. This semi nomadic way of life was neither chaotic nor primitive. It was a system adapted to abundance and renewal, built on an intimate understanding of land, seasons, and regeneration.

During the Swedish imperial era, this mode of life began to collide with another, one based on permanence, ownership, and taxation. As settlers moved westward and northward, many Finnish families from Savonia and Tavastia crossed into the forested territories of Sweden to practice their traditional methods. They became known as the Forest Finns. For a time, their work was welcomed. The Swedish Crown encouraged settlement to expand its borders, clear wilderness, and bring new land into cultivation. But as the state consolidated, its priorities shifted. The same people who had once been seen as pioneers began to appear as obstacles to order.

The Forest Finns lived in isolation, often far from parishes and officials. Their fields were temporary, their homes scattered, their language and customs different from those of settled farmers. Slash and burn agriculture conflicted with emerging forestry policies that valued timber as a taxable resource rather than a renewable commons. In time, the practice was restricted, and the settlers were pressed to abandon their mobility and adopt fixed forms of agriculture. Their way of life was not simply replaced but declared illegitimate. It was the beginning of enclosure at the northern edge of Europe.

At the same time another older people faced a similar fate. The Sámi had long moved across the northern landscape following the natural cycles. Their mobility too was incompatible with the emerging notion of property and the territorial ambitions of both Sweden and later Russia. The expansion of taxation, the spread of Christianity, and the mapping of land boundaries slowly dismantled a system that had endured for millennia. What had been a living world became an administrative one.

From Finland’s perspective, this transformation unfolded unevenly. In the east and north, people could still escape into the forest to live as they always had. Taxes and authorities were distant, and survival depended on skill, not compliance. Villages remained small, communication sparse, and much of the land untamed. It was possible to live outside the direct reach of power. In this sense, Finland remained a hinterland long after its western neighbors had been absorbed into more centralized systems. The forest was not only a source of livelihood but a form of resistance.

The difference between Finland and Sweden at that time reveals a deeper truth about the evolution of systems. Where control arrived early, it solidified into rigid institutions. Where it arrived late, traces of autonomy survived longer. The border between Sweden and Finland became more than a political line. It was a frontier between two modes of existence, one governed by fire, the other by fence.

Over centuries this difference continued to shape both societies. Sweden moved toward centralized order, bureaucracy, and urbanization, while Finland carried within it a memory of movement, hardship, and independence. The Finnish relationship to land remained more direct and personal. Even as industrialization advanced, the forest kept its moral and symbolic weight. It was still the place one could retreat to when the world became too managed.

The story of the Forest Finns and the Sámi is therefore not only about displacement but about a deeper transition in human consciousness. It marks the shift from living with the world to living over it. From the logic of reciprocity to the logic of possession. From landscape to territory. The fire that once renewed the forest gave way to the fence that divided it. What was lost was not only a way of life but a way of seeing the world.

Season of Light

In childhood Christmas felt like a passage into another layer of reality. There was expectation, mystery, and a sense of hidden order that no one could explain. The world seemed briefly to glow from within. Children do not yet distinguish between what is tangible and what is symbolic. They live in both at once. Dreams and fears merge with the physical world. The tree, the food, and the rituals carry a presence that feels real because it is shared by everyone around them.

In the countryside where I grew up, the tree was usually brought from the forest by the men of the household. Women prepared food, cleaned, and decorated. The division of roles was not rigid but formed through habit and purpose. Each person had a task that contributed to the whole. Even the animals once received attention. In older times they were given better feed or treats for Christmas, a gesture of gratitude for their part in human survival. That custom had vanished by my childhood, but one ritual remained, the sauna.

The sauna is perhaps the most enduring Finnish expression of renewal. Its form has changed, with metal stoves replacing stone or tile structures, but its meaning has survived. It is a moment of cleansing and intimacy, a suspension of daily order. Families enter together, and for a while everything unnecessary falls away. It is one of the few spaces where modern life still permits silence.

I do not remember exactly when the Christmas tree became part of Finnish custom. It is a relatively recent tradition, adapted from Europe a few centuries ago, yet it has absorbed older local meanings. It stands at the center of the room as a small piece of the forest brought into the home. Its lights and ornaments transform it into something both familiar and sacred. For children it becomes a bridge between the visible and the invisible. The gifts under it are not only material. They represent something being given from beyond comprehension, a brief contact with generosity that feels divine.

As years pass, that feeling changes. The death of older relatives marks the loss of continuity. My grandmother’s passing ended the rhythm that had held the family together. Houses are no longer generational. Families disperse, visit, or travel abroad. The coherence of the household fades into a schedule of visits. What was once a living structure becomes an event.

Historically, Christmas in Finland was also the moment of abundance in a long winter. Food was plentiful because it had been preserved from autumn. A pig was slaughtered, beer brewed, and people shared what they had. It was a time of reconciliation, of rest after labor, and of caring for those who lacked. The warmth of Christmas stood against the darkness outside.

In the present the ritual persists but its texture has thinned. Handmade gifts have been replaced by purchased ones. Giving has become indistinguishable from consuming. The act of making something for another person has been replaced by the transaction of acquisition. The source of the gift is no longer someone known but a faceless system of production. The Christmas tree, once a piece of living nature, is now often plastic and disposable. The spiritual gesture has become a seasonal performance.

Still, even in its weakened form, the tradition holds a trace of what it once was. The foods, the light, the shared meal, and the smell of pine remind people of continuity, even if they no longer understand its meaning. For a moment each year, amid the managed routines of modern life, there is a pause that echoes something older. It is the memory of coherence, flickering behind the decorations.

Between Ice and Sea

During the last Ice Age, the area we now call Finland was mostly covered by ice, but it was not entirely uninhabited. People moved with the rhythm of the glacial edge, following the retreat and advance of ice between what is now Finland and the regions stretching toward modern-day Ukraine. They lived along the borders of habitability, moving where there was food and game to hunt. It was a hard environment, but not lifeless. Archaeological findings suggest that humans were present here as soon as the land became even partially open. This early life was based on movement, adaptation, and a close understanding of natural rhythms. The later national and academic interpretations of this period have often been distorted or incomplete. Both Swedish and Russian rule, and later Finnish institutions, shaped the story of our origins in their own image, erasing or neglecting much of the evidence that did not fit political or ideological frameworks. Some of it has been lost simply because the authorities did not care to preserve it, and because organic materials decayed faster here than in places where stone was used for construction. In this sense, Finland has been a hinterland not only in geography but in memory, a place where knowledge itself has often been neglected or destroyed.

As the ice began to melt and retreat, the land started to rise from the sea. The first lakes and waterways appeared, and over time the sea broke through, creating coastal regions rich in life. Seals, fish, and seabirds became a foundation of survival, and people followed their patterns. Much of southern Finland was still underwater, but slowly new land emerged as the pressure of the ice lessened. These rising shores gave birth to the first small communities, living between water and forest, moving seasonally to find food. The oldest pottery found in Finland shows that this area stood at the crossroads of cultures. Decoration styles show both western and eastern influence. Some came from the Baltic and Central Europe, others from the direction of the Volga and beyond. During harsher periods these influences merged, perhaps out of necessity and cooperation, marking the beginning of something like a shared cultural identity.

Farming reached these northern lands gradually. People began to raise cattle and grow plants such as barley and flax, while still hunting and fishing as their main form of life. This slow adoption of agriculture created a balance between mobility and permanence. Settlements were first built along the coasts and rivers, and later spread inland as families sought new areas to inhabit. Trade also developed during this time. At first it was simple barter, but later became organized and long-distance. Amber, bronze, and other materials began to circulate. The arrival of bronze marked a turning point. It required specialized knowledge, trade connections, and collaboration. Bronze objects from Central Europe and Scandinavia were found here, but local workshops also began to appear, producing unique items. Different regions in Finland developed their own patterns and decorative styles that can be traced back to specific origins. Burial practices from this period show similar diversity. Stone mounds, mound burials, and boat burials all existed side by side. These were not isolated communities but active participants in the trade and symbolic life of northern Europe.

Findings from this time challenge the old idea that Finland was a passive or backward region. A significant number of swords, jewelry, and ornate metal objects have been found here, especially from the early Iron Age. The amount of high-quality swords, including many Ulfberht swords, equals that of Norway. This shows how well connected and capable the people of this region were, even if the later Swedish and European narratives downplayed their sophistication. The idea that civilization always came from somewhere else is still present today, especially in urban areas where many tend to dismiss the local and traditional as primitive. The archaeological record tells a very different story. It shows a population that was skilled in metalwork, trade, and design, living in harsh conditions yet adapting and creating on par with their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe.

Because the materials used for daily life and building were mostly organic, much of the evidence of early civilization has decayed. Houses, fences, and fortifications were made from peat, wood, and hay. These did not survive the same way as stone architecture, but traces of them remain in soil layers and in the peatlands. Excavations have revealed wooden fortifications, settlement sites, and sacred places, suggesting early forms of organized life and local governance. Trade and wealth also brought conflict. Prosperity made some areas targets for raiders, and local disputes became more violent. Still, there was a visible refinement of life. Clothing and personal decoration became detailed and colorful. We can assume, based on surviving textiles and comparisons with Finnic peoples in northwestern Russia, that color use was vivid and varied. It was a form of identity and pride, perhaps stronger than what is common in modern Finnish life.

The arrival of iron, and later the rise of fortified hilltop settlements, marked another transformation. Cooperation and defense began to take organized form. Small-scale agriculture, fishing, and hunting continued together, creating a mixed economy that gave resilience to local life. The population was small but widespread, shaped by nature’s constraints and opportunities. Finland became a bridge between east and west, not only geographically but culturally. It was never truly isolated. The movement of goods, ideas, and people made this place part of a larger northern network, where cultures interacted, borrowed, and redefined themselves continuously.

It has always been a place between worlds, formed by trade, adaptation, and survival. Life here emerged from constraint. The cold, the scarcity, and the isolation acted as the first boundaries within which adaptation could occur. What later became Finland was born not from abundance but from the constant need to find coherence within limitation. 

Vanishing Villages

In the Finnish countryside we can see a long development of decline. From stories, photographs, and people’s memories, we can piece together what village life once was. It would be wrong to imagine that life was easy or luxurious. Material possessions were few, winters were long, and survival required endurance. Yet even those considered poor had more space, more autonomy, and a clearer sense of purpose than most people working in specialized labor today. Families were large, land was available, and animals provided food and security. The land was not always owned by those who worked it, but the balance between obligation and stability was still more reasonable than the forms of servitude found today. Taxation was simpler and more transparent, and the natural environment was still largely intact. Forests were full of life, rivers were clean, and the distance between human work and nature was short. People depended on one another, and their lives were structured around this interdependence. Work was often shared between neighbors, from building houses to harvesting crops. Money was not always necessary, because value could be exchanged through skill and labor.

Over time, villages became more organized. Churches were built, public houses appeared, and local gatherings became more common. The population grew, and with it came both prosperity and hardship. During the late 1800s Finland experienced a devastating famine, remembered as one of the last great famines in Europe. It was caused by a series of poor harvests, bad weather in both spring and autumn, and the absence of any safety mechanisms. Thousands died of hunger and disease, many collapsing on the roads. People ate what they could find, sometimes even poisoned grains infected with ergot, which caused hallucinations and suffering. My own family survived on little more than grain porridge and weak soups, but they survived nonetheless. Memorials from that time still stand across the country, quiet reminders of how fragile life once was.

A few decades later, many Finns left for the United States in search of work, often ending up in mines or on construction sites. Some joined the socialist movements and later emigrated to the Soviet Union, only to disappear in purges and political cleansing. These were people searching for meaning and opportunity beyond the village, and what they found was often tragedy. The countryside began to thin, but its cultural rhythm remained. After the wars, Finland was poor again, and the landscape was scarred. Yet this period also created an unusual unity among people. Everyone was needed for rebuilding. Industry expanded, small businesses emerged, and optimism returned. Work was available, and the economy was still rooted in local production and exchange. Starting a small store or workshop was possible, because large corporations had not yet centralized life. The economy remained self-reliant and accessible to individuals with determination and skill.

By the middle of the century, rural life reached its peak. Villages were full of families and children, and every road led to someone’s home or business. Local stores sold clothing, food, and tools. Farmland reached from the house to the forest’s edge. Prosperity could even be seen in the appearance of gardens, which became symbols of abundance. In earlier times every piece of soil had to be used for survival, but now people could grow flowers and fruit for pleasure. New plants arrived from abroad, and even poor households had better food. Milk, butter, and meat were fresh and unprocessed. Despite limited wealth, the quality of life was higher in real, tangible terms. People ate together, worked together, and lived among relatives. Their possessions were few but meaningful, built to last.

Industrialization entered the countryside gradually. Small tractors replaced horses, sawmills grew larger, and new machines appeared on farms. Work became faster and more efficient. Produce could be sold beyond the local market, feeding growing cities that had lost their own self-sufficiency. Yet this also marked the beginning of dependence. The village was no longer an autonomous world. It became a supplier for distant consumers. My grandfather remembered how, even in the early 1900s, many barns still had mud floors, and the smell of livestock filled the air. Within a few decades this changed. New brick buildings appeared, concrete floors were poured, and metal containers cooled the milk. The change was modern and practical, but it also brought distance between the farmer and the soil. Fertilizer replaced manure, machinery replaced shared labor, and local rhythms gave way to industrial time.

The late twentieth century completed the transformation. Villages began to empty. Shops closed one after another. The younger generation moved to cities, drawn by higher wages and the illusion of freedom. Local industries disappeared, unable to compete with mass production. Roads improved, but their purpose changed. Cars allowed people to travel farther, yet each journey took them further from their home community. Roads once built to connect people now carried them away. Services followed the same path. Schools, post offices, and local administrations merged into regional centers. What had been a distributed network of life became a centralized system of management. What had been a living landscape became an infrastructure.

Today when I walk through the countryside, I see the remnants of that lost prosperity. The tools remain, the barns and fields still mark the shape of human presence, but the life that once filled them is gone. Old gravel roads have been replaced by asphalt. Cars move quickly through them, but they do not stop. People can travel anywhere, but they rarely find anything. The roads now serve efficiency, not life. Forests are drained and divided, bogs are cut into ditches, farms are stripped of animals, and fields have turned into empty grasslands waiting for subsidy paperwork to justify their existence. It is said that we are wealthier now, but in every meaningful sense we have less. Houses that once held large families now stand empty or rot in silence. To buy such a house in a city would require two full incomes, yet here they are abandoned, because what made them valuable no longer exists. People speak of progress and prosperity, but the visible reality tells the opposite story.

Loneliness has replaced community. Old people live alone, separated from their families, and the institutions that claim to care for them have replaced almost every form of human connection. The countryside is full of beauty, but also sorrow. It is a landscape of abandonment, where the human presence is reduced to a faint memory. The elderly try to move slowly through what remains, their lives shaped by television and media that have long detached from reality. People complain, they sense that something is wrong, but most cannot articulate what has happened. They express frustration without being able to connect their personal experience to the larger structure that caused it. The system that destroyed their way of life still defines their reality, and the language to question it has been forgotten. When life is organized entirely by abstraction, even suffering loses its name.

What vanished with the village was not only a way of working or living, but a way of being human. The countryside once represented coherence, a balance between need and meaning, between labor and rest, between people and nature. That foundation has eroded. What remains is an imitation of prosperity without its substance, a managed emptiness that calls itself progress. The fields are still there, the roads still stretch through the forests, but their purpose has been inverted. They no longer sustain life.

Crucible of Survival

Before the wars, Finland was still an agrarian society recovering from the civil conflict that had divided families, villages, and entire regions. The wounds were deep. Brothers had fought brothers, prisoners were held in miserable conditions, and resentment lingered across political and social boundaries. Both sides believed they were righteous, and the result was not reconciliation but exhaustion.

The country was full of contrasts. Poverty and wealth existed side by side, monarchy and democracy were debated as political futures, the countryside remained loosely organized while the cities began to adopt administrative structures. Some sought an industrial future, others wanted to preserve the old agrarian balance. In this diversity there was still a search for autonomy, a desire for self-definition in political, cultural, and economic life. Nothing was yet unified.

Unity came only when the threat became tangible. In the 1930s Finland experienced short periods of prosperity and growing international visibility. The Helsinki Olympics were being prepared, and figures from abroad, including Adolf Hitler, attended earlier events. For a moment it seemed Finland could join the modern world through sport, culture, and technological optimism. Athletic achievement symbolized progress and harmony, an early expression of the global identity that would later dominate the century. Beneath that optimism, however, the memory of civil war and the awareness of the Soviet presence kept unease alive. When war came, it did not erase those tensions but forced them into alignment.

The Winter War transformed difference into survival. Monarchists, communists, capitalists, workers, and farmers found themselves in the same trenches. The unification was not idealistic, but it was real. The means were limited, the motivation uncertain, but the goal was clear. The country faced an overwhelming power and feared not only occupation but absorption into a system that would erase economic and cultural autonomy. For many, defeat meant the loss of a way of life, perhaps even annihilation.

Material conditions were desperate. Finland had few planes, little artillery, and almost no tanks. Some volunteers had received training in Germany and were first viewed with suspicion or hostility. Later they were remembered as necessary and even heroic. The enemy’s strength in men and machines was enormous, but Finnish forces relied on unity, local knowledge, and personal initiative. Each individual carried a share of responsibility that far exceeded the normal expectations of war.

What later came to be called the miracle of the Winter War was not a miracle at all but a moment of complete mobilization of every remaining resource, both material and moral. The forest, once a place of work and shelter, became the field of resistance. Terrain that had sustained life now sustained defense. Decentralization, once a weakness, became an advantage. Soldiers fought close to their homes, on land they understood intimately. The war machine that confronted them operated through hierarchy and obedience; the defense of Finland operated through familiarity and will.

This difference mattered. The Soviet system valued scale and conformity. The Finnish defense depended on adaptation and individual competence. Outnumbered and under-equipped, Finnish units developed methods suited to the landscape, moving through snow, forest, and silence with precision. The enemy expected a quick victory and met instead a drawn-out war of attrition that consumed lives and morale.

The cost was immense. Cities burned, families were torn apart, and tens of thousands were displaced. Yet the experience forged a sense of unity that no political order had managed to create. It was not built on ideology but on necessity. Autonomy was preserved, though at a price measured in lives and ruins.

Looking back, it is clear that this cohesion was temporary. It arose from shared danger, not shared vision. When the war ended and peace returned, the forces that had united the country began to dissipate. Still, the memory of that unity became part of the national identity. It shaped expectations of endurance, self-reliance, and sacrifice long after the material conditions that had produced them disappeared.

If a similar crisis came today, it is difficult to imagine the same response. The foundations of family, community, and local belonging that once gave meaning to sacrifice have weakened. Many live alone, detached from the structures that once made collective action possible. The war revealed what Finland could become when necessity overrode division. It also revealed how fragile that unity was, and how easily it could vanish once survival was no longer the only goal.

PART II: TRANSFORMATIONS 

Awakening of the Machine

When industrial development began to reach Finland, it did not arrive with understanding or restraint. The early relationship between people and nature was shaped by necessity and ignorance more than foresight. During the Swedish period, large-scale development was almost impossible. The country was poor, sparsely populated, and limited by geography. The empire took resources but invested little.

When Finland became part of the Russian Empire, conditions changed. For the first time, there was room for local development, and people began to improve their living standards. Yet this improvement came from an extremely low base. The society was still largely agrarian, and the majority of people lived in material scarcity. Small industries appeared in the nineteenth century, particularly sawmills that used water power from rivers and streams. This was the beginning of Finland’s industrial transformation, but also the beginning of its ecological degradation.

Tar production was among the first major industries. It relied on cutting down vast areas of forest to burn wood in pits and extract tar for export. Tar was used to waterproof ships and buildings and became a major source of income. Even today, traces of these early industrial sites remain in the landscape. One can still find pits and scars in the ground where forests were once burned for production. For many people, forestry and tar burning were the only ways to earn money, a shift from subsistence to trade.

At the time, people had little understanding of ecological systems. The forest was seen as endless, a chaotic expanse of trees that simply grew out of the ground on their own. A saying from that period described how people believed trees appeared randomly and could not be intentionally seeded. The forest was treated as an obstacle to survival or a resource to be consumed. It was cut without planning, stripped bare, and seen as something to be conquered rather than respected.

Industrialization expanded this mindset. When chemical industries developed, their waste was poured into lakes and rivers. Fish populations collapsed, and once-pristine waters became toxic. The smell of decay spread across industrial towns. The justification was always the same: that environmental protection was too expensive or would threaten livelihoods. People were told that pollution was a necessary price for progress. This logic continues today in other forms. The same rhetoric of inconvenience is used to defend actions that destroy ecosystems. It is not only the destruction that repeats, but the reasoning behind it.

Some of Finland’s largest lakes, including Päijänne, became heavily polluted. People lost faith that nature could recover. In some cases, the ecosystem proved more resilient than expected, slowly restoring itself. In others, the damage remained. Industrialization had expanded the scale of impact beyond what people could comprehend. The problems were no longer local or temporary. They became systemic.

When people today speak about how industrialization improved life, they often forget the context. For many, history begins with industrialization itself. It is easy to believe that everything before it was primitive and that progress only started once machines arrived. But this view ignores what was lost and how the new systems created problems on a larger scale. The material improvements were real, but so were the dependencies and damages that came with them.

During and after the wars, Finland’s forests were exploited even more aggressively. Large areas were clear-cut to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union and to fuel domestic industrial growth. The country was rebuilt through exhaustion of its natural base. Plans were even made to extend these clear-cutting operations across immense regions of forest, projects so vast that they appear absurd today. Although those extreme schemes were abandoned, the method remained. Clear-cutting continues to be the dominant forestry practice, justified through economic reasoning and presented as rational management.

The industrial transformation of Finland was not guided by malice but by blindness. People acted within the limits of what they could see and understand. Yet those limits had consequences that still define the country. The forest, once seen as dangerous and mysterious, became a controlled space of production. What had been a living system turned into a managed resource. The Machine had awakened, and its first movements were felt through the land itself.

Welfare Machine

The foundations of Finland’s welfare state were laid in the 1960s. Before that time, the population lived with far less institutional protection. Pensions were minimal or nonexistent, often based on certain trades or vocations only. Many professions, particularly in public service or heavy industry, began to form their own pension arrangements, but large parts of the population had no coverage at all. Most people still relied on family, community, or small personal savings for old age or periods of illness. The early pension contributions were between zero and five percent of income, which meant that the generation before the large post-war cohorts was largely left to survive on its own.

The new system was created for the large generations born after the war. It guaranteed pensions, social assistance, and later a universal healthcare and education structure. For the first time, citizens could expect a degree of economic security from the state. It was a profound transformation in both material and moral terms. The government became the guarantor of life’s continuity, replacing the informal systems that had once linked generations and communities.

At first, the welfare expansion appeared to unify society. Pensions, health services, schools, and unemployment benefits were established almost simultaneously. The network was wide but organized through central planning. Schools, clinics, and administrative offices appeared across the country, even in small municipalities. The state reached everywhere, and through it the idea of equality became an organizing principle. Everyone was to be treated the same, regardless of background or ability.

Education was a central part of this new structure. The modern Finnish school system, created in the 1960s and 1970s, reflected the political mood of the time. It leaned toward egalitarian and leftist ideas, emphasizing social unity and collective responsibility. At times it crossed into direct ideological influence. In Pirkkala, a case of communist propaganda in the classroom became public and sparked national debate. The curriculum was later moderated, but the ideological direction remained. The school system continued to favor the average and to view deviation as a problem. Individuality and difference were subordinated to uniformity, creating a culture of conformity disguised as equality.

As the welfare institutions expanded, dependence deepened. The pension system that once symbolized progress became, over time, a financial and generational burden. The early beneficiaries received far more than they had contributed, and the system was designed to protect these payouts from future political change. Pension rights became constitutionally fixed property, while younger generations were obligated to fund them through high taxation. What had begun as a promise of security became a permanent redistribution from the young to the old.

The broader welfare structure had similar effects. Healthcare, education, and social assistance became universal expectations, but also centralized points of control. People no longer relied primarily on family or community. They relied on the system. What had been relationships of obligation and care became procedures managed by distant institutions. Over time, these institutions began to replace the functions of family itself.

The transformation also reshaped gender and family relations. Women’s suffrage and entry into the workforce were significant advances, yet they also redefined economic dependency. The state, rather than the household, became the main provider and arbiter of welfare. When families separated, the man’s role was legally preserved as financial responsibility enforced through bureaucratic structures. The result was a family system increasingly fragmented, in which both parents and children were indirectly dependent on the state. The extended family model that once connected generations eroded rapidly.

Businesses, too, changed under the welfare regime. The social responsibilities that employers once held for workers were absorbed by public systems. Job security, healthcare, and education became externalized to the state. What seemed like progress also dissolved the mutual accountability that had previously tied work, community, and social life together. The state had assumed responsibility for everyone, and in doing so it had become the central actor in the life of every citizen.

The welfare system was not built with malicious intent. It grew from a sincere desire to prevent poverty and inequality. But it also marked the beginning of a deeper shift. People ceased to see themselves as autonomous participants in society and began to experience themselves as managed subjects of it. The Machine that had once processed wood and metal now processed human life.

This period created a lasting cultural and psychological change. Dependence on systems replaced mutual dependence among people. Responsibility moved upward into bureaucracy and outward into law. The structures that guaranteed equality also erased difference and autonomy. What had begun as an effort to humanize industrial society ultimately completed its transformation. The Machine had entered the home, not through violence or ideology, but through care.

Family and the Expanding State

One of the deeper social consequences of the welfare era was the rearrangement of roles within the family. When the state began to guarantee security directly to individuals through income support, healthcare, and education, it also weakened the economic interdependence that had once held households together. What had been the basic social unit of survival became an administrative unit of citizens.

Women’s political and economic participation grew rapidly in this setting. The change is often described as liberation, but it can also be understood as a transfer of dependency from the household to the state. The husband’s traditional role as provider diminished, not because security increased within the family, but because it was externalized. When families separated, the legal and bureaucratic system replaced informal negotiation. Maintenance payments and social benefits replaced shared life. The result was a structure where both men and women depended on public systems rather than each other.

This shift dissolved the extended family that had once carried knowledge, care, and moral continuity. Elderly relatives moved into institutional care, children into standardized education, and adults into workplaces and benefit schemes governed by the same administrative logic. The family no longer mediated between individual and society. The state did. It decided how support was distributed, how responsibility was defined, and how conflict was resolved.

Seen systemically, this was not a question of gender progress or regression but of integration. The welfare state absorbed the functions of kinship and redistributed them through bureaucracy. What had once been personal obligation became legal obligation. The change improved material stability but eroded the autonomy of social life. The Machine that had managed production now managed reproduction.

Fragmentation of Unity

The postwar welfare period gave Finland a sense of unity that few societies have ever achieved. After decades of war, poverty, and reconstruction, the 1950s and 1960s created a feeling of shared direction. The country was poor but stable, centralized yet functional. It had a coherent identity built on work, endurance, and consensus. This balance reached its political and cultural peak during the long presidency of Urho Kekkonen.

Kekkonen’s era represented the height of managed stability. He ruled as a symbol of national continuity, a leader who maintained Finland’s delicate position between the West and the Soviet Union. His authority transcended party lines and became a mechanism of control in itself. Under the constant pressure of the Soviet presence, open opposition was discouraged, and political decisions were often made through personal relationships. Much of the country’s direction was set in informal gatherings, business trips, and sauna meetings. The system appeared democratic, but in practice it relied on a tightly knit elite and the suppression of open conflict.

When Kekkonen’s health declined and his era ended, the country entered a period of reaction. Mauno Koivisto’s presidency marked a shift toward the West and a gradual loosening of the earlier political discipline. As the Soviet Union weakened under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, Finland began to look outward with new confidence. The atmosphere became more open, but also more fragmented. New currents of thought, culture, and economy entered from abroad. Popular literature and magazines such as Valitut Palat reflected this Western orientation and gave ordinary people a sense of belonging to a wider world. 

The 1980s brought economic liberalization and the beginning of what many later called the casino economy. Credit expanded, markets opened, and material wealth increased rapidly. For the first time, consumption itself became a central part of identity. Yet much of this prosperity was built on speculation rather than production. When the global cycle turned and the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland entered a deep depression. Bankruptcies multiplied, unemployment soared, and suicide rates rose. The optimism of the previous decades dissolved into uncertainty and debt. I was born in this period, when the promise of endless growth began to reveal its consequences.

Agriculture also changed radically during this time. The modernization of farms displaced older ways of life at a speed no one had expected. Horses, once essential to farming and war, disappeared almost overnight, replaced by machines. This was a practical improvement, but it also ended a long cultural relationship between people and the animal that had carried them through hunger, cold, and reconstruction. The loss was not only emotional but symbolic. It marked another step away from the tangible life that had once tied human effort to living systems.

Farmers’ fairs and agricultural exhibitions became celebrations of this new progress. Tools, tractors, and industrial fertilizers represented a future of ease and abundance. Few questioned what was being lost. The same optimism spread through the younger generation, who began to view the traditional life of their parents with disdain. They sought new experiences, urban culture, and foreign influence. Many left rural life altogether, moving toward industrial work or education in the cities.

This demographic and cultural shift was enabled by the large size of the postwar generations. Their numbers gave them power and visibility that no generation before or after has matched. They filled the schools, factories, and political institutions, reshaping the country according to their own experience of growth and stability. But as the older foundations eroded, so did the cohesion that had sustained the country through hardship.

The apparent progress of this period was built on consumption of what earlier generations had accumulated. Economic growth often came from the sale or exhaustion of inherited stability. Debts grew larger, and social structures thinned. The belief in constant advancement replaced the older ethic of endurance. By the end of the century, Finland had transformed from a unified society of limits into a fragmented society of possibilities. Every step toward openness and complexity increased the distance between people and the systems that governed them.

The optimism of the era was genuine, yet its costs were hidden. Beneath the surface of material improvement, the cultural soil was being consumed. The future was spent in advance, and the illusion of progress concealed the slow loss of coherence. What had once been a nation of shared direction had become a system of disconnected movements, each believing itself free while moving within the same machinery.

Digital Threshold

The 1990s were a period of transition. After the economic collapse, the system was forced to renew itself. The structures that had once held society together were pared down, reformed, or discarded. Finland was on its way to becoming part of a globalized world.

For many, this period was marked by scarcity. Money was tight and material goods were few. Most households had only basic appliances such as a television, a landline telephone, and a radio. The consumer abundance of later decades had not yet arrived. In many families unemployment, debt, and exhaustion replaced the optimism of the 1980s. Parents struggled, and some children were left neglected as economic pressure and social dislocation spread.

In rural areas the effects came later and more slowly. The villages still retained traces of older life. I remember attending a small village school where we walked, biked, or skied to class. The food was cooked on site, and pupils were expected to contribute by bringing something of their own, such as berries picked from the forest. At the time I did not understand why this mattered, but later it became clear that this was a remnant of an earlier order, where cooperation and participation were still tangible. Two years later the school was closed, and the village began to empty. Education was centralized, and the new schools in town were larger, more anonymous, and more mechanical in their relationships.

The connection between teacher and student weakened. Feedback became procedural rather than personal. Children were assessed through standardized systems, and the old sense of shared responsibility disappeared. These changes reflected the larger transformation of the country. The welfare structures that had once created unity were now being replaced by networks, contracts, and digital administration.

Yet this decade was also the last moment before full digital dependency. Social life still relied on physical presence. People visited one another, borrowed tools, and looked after neighbors. The phone was used to arrange real meetings, not to replace them. Loneliness existed, but it had not yet been normalized. The rural culture still contained small pockets of coherence, though it was clearly at the end of its course.

As urbanization intensified, those patterns of everyday contact faded. The new residential areas built in the 1990s were organized around cars and privacy. Public spaces became functional rather than communal. Children spent more time indoors, and screens began to replace shared play. The first generation of video games arrived, offering simulated experiences of hunting, gathering, and building that no longer existed in everyday life. The digital world began to mirror what had been lost in the physical one.

In this sense, the 1990s formed a threshold. The industrial and bureaucratic Finland of the previous decades was dissolving, but the digital society that replaced it had not yet solidified. It was a moment when the material scarcity of the past coexisted with the emerging abstractions of the future. The connection to land and community was still visible but fading. What came next would complete the transformation: life inside the system of data, automation, and managed interaction.

PART III: ABSTRACTIONS 

Evolution of Money in Finland

In the beginning, money in Finland was not symbolic. It was matter. People traded metals, furs, and agricultural goods, things that carried inherent value and could be touched, stored, or exchanged. Silver coins from Europe and Russia reached Finnish markets through trade routes and local barter networks, but most value remained tied to tangible labor and material goods.

The idea of paper money arrived much later. It was first used in China centuries earlier as a promise of payment, and in Europe Sweden became one of the first to adopt it. Finland, still part of the Swedish realm at that time, was introduced to this new logic of value by extension. The paper note was not valuable itself, but it represented something behind it, backed by the king and the early modern state. That state in turn was grounded in tangible structures such as the army, taxation, and land. The abstraction was still limited by the presence of power.

During the period of Russian rule, Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy and was allowed to maintain its own laws, currency, and administration. The markka, introduced in the 1860s, was tied to silver and later to gold. This gave the Finnish people a sense of continuity and stability, something real behind the promise. The markka’s value was anchored in metals, and its management remained a matter of national decision. The money represented something physical that existed in the world.

The twentieth century broke that connection. The gold standard, which had limited the symbolic expansion of money, began to fail. Wars, reconstruction, and political instability pushed every state to print more currency than its reserves could support. Money became a contract between governments and their populations, no longer a reflection of physical assets. The symbol overtook the substance.

In the postwar decades, Finland’s markka was managed as a tool of policy rather than a reflection of material value. The state devalued it repeatedly to maintain competitiveness in exports and protect industrial labor. The paper note now stood for a political decision rather than a measurable good. Inflation became a method of governance, and the gap between what people produced and what their money represented widened.

The next rupture came when Finland joined the European Union and later adopted the euro. The national currency was abandoned, and with it the last direct sign of monetary sovereignty. The new money was not backed by a national treasury, land, or resources, but by the European Central Bank. The ECB, in turn, is backed not by gold or industry, but by institutional credibility and policy consensus. Its power exists in trust, not in tangible wealth. Finland’s role inside this system is largely administrative. It produces real goods but trades in symbolic value.

The next step in this evolution is digitalization. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have introduced a new kind of abstraction, not backed by any institution but by the technological process itself. Blockchain networks operate as systems of verification and ownership detached from political structures. They are maintained through computation, not through governance. The code becomes the contract.

In response, institutions such as the European Central Bank are developing their own digital currencies. The stated purpose is convenience and security, but the implications reach much deeper. Digital money can be programmed, monitored, and limited. It allows those in power to determine not only who can spend, but on what and when. Access to value can be restricted or revoked. What is presented as modernization carries the potential for total management.

This pattern is familiar. Every technological innovation is first optional, then convenient, and finally unavoidable. In Finland, the same process occurred with infrastructure. Roads once connected isolated villages, but over time they erased the need for local production and made long travel a necessity. Centralization was presented as progress, and soon life could not exist outside it. Digital currency follows the same logic. It begins as an alternative, becomes the norm, and ends as the condition of participation.

The monetary system is reaching the limits of its own abstraction. It continues to expand symbolically while the real economy weakens beneath it. The value of work, land, and production is increasingly defined by systems that exist far beyond the control of those who create it. Each new layer of financial technology grows more efficient but less stable, more powerful but less human.

Finland stands as a small example of a global truth. Its forests, land, and labor remain real, yet their worth is determined in invisible networks of belief. The distance between the tangible and the symbolic has never been greater. The system will either collapse under its contradictions or renew itself by rediscovering value in what can be seen, touched, and lived.

Managed Field

Farming offers a clear view into how human systems have developed. At first, people lived by the rhythm of renewal. Forests were cut, burned, and left to heal. The method of slash and burn was not random destruction but imitation of nature’s own cycle. Burned land quickly returned to life with force, and people learned to follow that pattern. They watched how fertility emerged from ash and understood that renewal came through disturbance.

In this world, animals were companions in work and survival. Over generations they were shaped by selection, not through laboratories but through patience and necessity. In Finland endurance mattered more than productivity. Long hair, thick feathers, and resistance to the cold were valued over output. Tools followed the same trajectory. Wooden plows gained metal tips, then became fully metal, and finally so large that only heavy machines could move them. Each change required another layer of organization, management, and energy. The self-reliant farm became dependent on industry. The natural fertility of the soil was replaced by artificial fertilizers, the cycle of burning and rest replaced by chemical renewal.

The first official record of many farms came through taxation. Before the state, before the church, there were no documents. The act of taxing created the category itself. Later, churches maintained archives, and after them the state. Older institutions supported the emergence of new ones but were eventually consumed or transformed by them. The same pattern continues today. States now support systems that will one day replace them. National governance becomes union governance, and even the unions are being overtaken by digital infrastructures that manage what was once political through technical means.

Farming has long been a target of external control. Earlier, taxation was standardized by the size of the farm or the amount of land worked. Paperwork was physical, burdens measured in fields and hours. Now the control has become digital. Every meter of land is mapped, monitored, and reported. Farmers are instructed when to till, what to plant, and how to manage their soil. Subsidies define survival, and the same systems that sustain them also destroy them. A farmer who once relied on knowledge, weather, and intuition now lives inside algorithms. Decisions are made by people who have never touched the ground they regulate.

By the end of the last century, Finnish farming was still largely sustainable. Small farms balanced livestock, crops, and forest in living systems. Then political programs began to close them down, favoring larger and more efficient units. Productivity replaced resilience. Now those same structures speak of sustainability, but as an administrative principle, not a lived reality. Instead of restoring what was lost, they attempt to simulate it through control.

This logic extends even to how the environment is measured. Emission models classify forests and grazing animals as pollutants, as if the living cycle of soil, grass, and cow were equal to industrial waste. The calculations do not measure reality but reference other calculations, creating a self-referential system detached from the world it claims to represent. A country like Finland, rich in forest and low in population, appears as a high emitter because its models are defined by global averages that ignore difference. The symbolic order has replaced observation.

The physical world of farming has followed the same trajectory. Houses once built from local wood are now dependent on materials produced elsewhere. Machines, tools, and even seeds come through international systems. The farm that once embodied autonomy now functions as a node inside a network it cannot influence. It is managed from afar, integrated into policies and programs that have little to do with the life of the soil.

What was once a rhythm of renewal has become a process of administration. The land no longer rests. The farmer no longer decides. The field that once regenerated itself now waits for permission to grow

Incoherent Forest

Finland is one of the most forested countries in the world. The forest has shaped its economy, culture, and national identity, yet it has also become one of the clearest examples of how a complex system can lose internal coherence.

After the 1950s large-scale ditching projects began. Vast wetland areas were drained to increase the amount of productive forest. In many regions over ninety percent of the bogs disappeared. The goal was to create forests that could be managed more efficiently for industrial use. What was once natural diversity became a uniform surface designed for machines. This period coincided with the mechanization of forestry and the rise of heavy equipment that replaced manual and horse labor.

Over time the entire landscape was reorganized into a system of measurable resources. Every piece of land was registered, its tree species, volume, and growth rates catalogued in digital databases. Forestry planning shifted from local knowledge to centralized data management. Satellites, mapping systems, and predictive models now determine when and how forests are cut. The forest became a technical object rather than a living environment.

Yet despite this extreme organization, the system has become internally contradictory. For decades, Finland imported wood from Russia at prices that kept domestic wood artificially cheap. The logic was to support the competitiveness of the forest industry by lowering raw material costs. It was an engineered imbalance: buying expensive wood from abroad in order to depress prices at home. When the Russian border closed and imports stopped, the structure of that manipulation became visible. Suddenly the same resource that covers most of the country was said to be “too expensive.”

The contradiction deepens. Logging has slowed or halted in many areas. Mills are closing or struggling because wood is simultaneously abundant and unavailable. Landowners find that while nominal prices for wood have risen, the real value of what they receive has steadily declined. A stand of trees that once could buy a tractor or major equipment no longer covers the same cost. Inflation and rising expenses have made the exchange increasingly unfavorable. The purchasing power of forest income has weakened decade by decade, even though official statistics show higher prices.

The forest owner’s position has eroded inside an economic system where value is determined less by material substance than by monetary and policy structures designed to serve industrial stability and the logic of global competition. The world market rewards the cheapest, not the most coherent, form of extraction. Less organized and less regulated operations abroad can undercut prices while operating with far lower costs. From a technical perspective they appear inefficient, but within the symbolic logic of the global economy they become more profitable.

In this structure, the forest no longer functions as material wealth but as a financial and symbolic entity. Its value exists as data, projections, and expectations that circulate far beyond the trees themselves. Forest-based investment products and speculative instruments now behave like paper gold, abstracting the forest into numbers that rise and fall according to financial moods rather than ecological or industrial reality. The result is a self-referential economy that regulates the very material base it claims to depend on.

The detachment between the real and the symbolic is visible in ownership itself. Even buying a forest has become increasingly difficult. Banks are reluctant to provide loans, and forest land is often not accepted as collateral. The tangible resource is no longer trusted by the financial layer that governs it. What once served as the foundation of rural wealth and independence is now treated as an illiquid, outdated asset. In a system that values abstractions more than substance, the forest itself no longer qualifies as value.

At the same time the industrial value chain is moving backward. Instead of developing high-value wood products, the sector increasingly focuses on raw materials and basic pulp. Advanced innovations, which could create genuine value, have not expanded in proportion to resource use. The system has reached a stage where it extracts more and produces less.

This trajectory cannot continue indefinitely. A structure that lives through contradiction must eventually transform or collapse. The forestry system, like many others built on symbolic control, has reached a threshold where the symbolic order can no longer sustain the material base that supports it. Either the relationship between people, land, and resource will renew itself on a smaller, more coherent scale, or the imbalance will resolve through breakdown. In both cases, the illusion of endless management will end

European Abstraction

In the past, Finland’s foreign relations were defined by proximity to the Soviet Union. The YYA treaty required constant negotiation, with many decisions presented for approval to Moscow. It was a relationship of dependence, but one that still recognized Finland’s separate existence. The country had its own money, laws, and cultural institutions.

Even during the earlier period under the Russian Empire, Finland maintained a degree of autonomy that is rarely acknowledged today. We had our own currency, postal system, administration, and even exemption from the Russian military draft. The Finnish legal system followed Swedish models, and local decision-making remained intact. The autonomy period is often remembered as a time of subordination, but it also represented one of the rare historical cases where a small nation could exist as a distinct and functioning entity inside a larger empire.

The independence movement emerged when this balance was broken. As the empire began to centralize power and demand closer integration, Finns saw it as oppression. It was the moment when symbolic authority tried to replace tangible self-determination. The response was to reclaim the right to decide, to act, and to own one’s future.

Today, that situation has reappeared in a more sophisticated form. Finland is again part of a larger structure, the European Union, but the mechanisms of influence are more abstract and harder to see. Where the Soviet Union had direct oversight, the European Union operates through law, finance, and bureaucracy. The symbols differ, but the principle is the same.

We no longer have our own money. The euro removed one of the core tools of sovereignty. The legal framework is layered, with European law above Finnish law. New directives arrive as obligations, to be implemented whether or not they fit the local context. Sometimes there is limited room for interpretation, but never for rejection. The process is continuous alignment toward uniformity.

This is presented as progress under the banners of unity, democracy, equality, and freedom. The project is sold as a natural evolution, as if the merging of nations into a continental structure were inevitable. But in practice it serves the same logic as any industrial or digital system: the removal of obstacles, borders, and differences that make efficient management difficult. Free movement of capital, goods, and labor is less about freedom than about operational convenience. A system without friction is a system without diversity.

The EU has its own flag, anthem, and constitution, yet these are not openly called instruments of sovereignty. They are described as treaties or cooperative frameworks, concealing the scale of the power they represent. Even the redistributive programs such as regional development funds, agricultural subsidies, social or infrastructure aid are not acts of generosity. They are tools to build compatible systems and infrastructure for efficient extraction and integration. The wealthier economies do not give; they invest in control.

Criticism of this system is often dismissed as ignorance or nationalism. Those who question its efficiency or overreach are portrayed as provincial or regressive. Yet they often sense something real: the loss of tangible connection between people and power. The EU is an abstract apparatus. It cannot be seen, touched, or directly experienced. It acts through regulation, digital infrastructure, and financial mechanisms that shape everyday life without ever revealing their source.

Decision-making is distant from those it affects. Power operates through layers of delegation where accountability dissolves. Those at the top are not chosen by direct will but selected through internal consensus. The elected parliament functions more as a symbolic confirmation than a center of authority. Advancement within the structure requires agreement with the system’s underlying logic, not opposition to it. The language of democracy masks a technocratic process of self-preservation.

This structure depends on constant management of perception. It presents its actions as moral necessities, guided by abstract values that cannot be questioned. Words like freedom, equality, and sustainability serve as political algorithms that justify expansion and control. The more abstract the language becomes, the less it refers to any concrete reality.

The ideal European citizen in this framework is no longer rooted in place, culture, or community. The new European is designed for movement, not belonging. They are told they are free because they can go anywhere, but that freedom exists only within the system’s borders. They can move, but they cannot detach. Their independence depends entirely on invisible networks, digital systems, and bureaucratic permissions. They are not grounded in the land, only in the flow of data and finance.

This transformation has created a new kind of dependency. The old empires demanded obedience through authority; the new empire demands compliance through systems. It does not command; it manages. It does not punish dissent; it neutralizes it through complexity. The result is a civilization that confuses participation with consent and management with cooperation.

The pattern is familiar. Like every structure that grows through integration and abstraction, it approaches a threshold. The more it expands, the more it loses contact with the material realities that sustain it. As in all complex systems, a point arrives when coherence cannot be maintained. Either the system will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or it will renew itself by returning power and meaning to the tangible, the local, and the real.

The lesson is not new. Finland’s past already showed that the loss of autonomy disguised as progress always ends the same way: in crisis and redefinition. The question is whether we recognize the pattern in time, or whether we must once again learn it through collapse.

Collapse of Coherence

During Finland’s industrialization, labor unions emerged from imbalance. The early industrial system had no internal coherence. Workers faced poverty and long hours while the owners of capital consolidated control. Out of this fragmentation, people began to seek structure. The language of class and labor became a way to restore balance. The worker and the employer were symbolic opposites within the same process, two sides of a single system trying to understand itself.

Over time this duality evolved into a kind of negotiated equilibrium. The Finnish economic model, often described as a success story, was built on this stability. It rested on an understanding that neither side could exist without the other. Workers offered security and loyalty in exchange for predictable wages and protection from volatility. Employers accepted the limits of negotiation in return for social peace and the ability to plan long-term investments. The system developed feedback through continuous dialogue. It was not efficient, but it was coherent.

As the economy opened to international trade and finance, this balance began to erode. The pressures of global competition demanded flexibility, while the institutional structures of the old model resisted change. The unions grew bureaucratic, defending forms that no longer matched the new economic reality. The private sector, on the other hand, drifted toward unilateral decision-making. Market logic replaced social dialogue. The symbolic partnership that had once produced stability became an empty ritual.

The result is a society that has lost feedback between its essential parts. Employers and workers no longer share a sense of mutual dependence. Each perceives the other as an obstacle. Businesses argue that taxation and regulation have strangled innovation, while workers see stagnating wages and vanishing security. Both are correct within their perspective, yet neither can restore coherence alone. The system is trapped in a recursive conflict, where the tools that once created balance now reproduce division.

This loss of feedback has spread into other structures. The pension system, once the cornerstone of social trust, now absorbs vast resources while burdening younger generations. Progressive taxation, intended to equalize opportunity, has reached a point where extra work often yields little personal benefit. The incentive to take responsibility has weakened. People withdraw from initiative, while institutions expand to compensate.

Finland’s economy still operates, but its internal rhythm is broken. The old coherence between labor, capital, and governance has collapsed. The unions represent a memory of dialogue. The corporations represent a new abstraction detached from its social base. The state mediates between them but has itself become a machine of redistribution rather than renewal.

In this sense, the Finnish system mirrors the broader pattern of complex societies that lose the ability to regenerate. The original coherence that sustained growth has turned into inertia. The feedback loops that once stabilized production now amplify conflict. The worker and the owner no longer meet in negotiation but in accusation.

This is how a system approaches collapse, not through sudden catastrophe but through the slow erosion of trust. When coherence is lost, each part pursues survival without regard for the whole. The result is stagnation disguised as stability, motion without direction, and prosperity that exists only in statistics.

Technocratic Mind

In Finland, public discussion increasingly depends on expert authority. People rarely argue from their own reasoning or experience. Instead, they reference what an expert has said or what a study has concluded. This trend is presented as progress toward a knowledge-based society, but it has led to dependence on systems of information that few understand. Thinking has become delegated to institutions rather than developed personally.

The modern expert functions as an intermediary between the system and the population. Their legitimacy comes from their position, not from practical understanding. Universities and research organizations produce vast amounts of studies, but many of them only repeat the assumptions built into the frameworks that finance them. They reference each other rather than the real world. The process resembles industrial production, where the goal is quantity and conformity rather than insight.

This has created a cultural habit of compliance. When citizens or politicians justify decisions, they point to external authority instead of making independent judgments. Public agencies cite research that confirms pre-decided policies, and media relies on a narrow circle of approved voices. Real debate is replaced by a ritual of verification. The appearance of scientific consensus often hides ideological alignment or bureaucratic inertia.

As the system grows more complex, people are discouraged from questioning it. The volume of information is so large that few attempt to evaluate it directly. Correlations are mistaken for causes, and technical terminology is used to mask uncertainty. This has produced a paradox: while the society claims to be driven by knowledge, most individuals no longer know how that knowledge is formed or validated.

The result is intellectual passivity. People learn to trust the structure instead of their senses. Humanistic and critical disciplines are dismissed as unproductive because they do not generate immediate economic value. Research that once aimed to understand reality now serves the function of maintaining administrative coherence.

Finland’s technocratic culture reflects a broader shift in modern societies. Expertise has turned into a form of control rather than enlightenment. The ability to think independently is replaced by the ability to reference correctly. What used to be judgment has become management.

Hollow Screen

When you look at the history of film and television in Finland, you can see how it reflects the changing structure of the society itself. Early Finnish films were often connected to ordinary life. They showed the countryside, working people, small towns, humor, and human imperfection. Even when the stories carried political or moral undertones, they were still close to the soil. They reflected the reality people lived in, not as an ideal but as something recognizable. Viewers could see their own lives mirrored on the screen. It was not glamorous, but it was coherent.

War propaganda films marked one of the first clear shifts toward symbolic control. They were used to strengthen collective order, to present the nation as unified and purposeful. Yet even these films still carried something tangible. They showed faces, villages, landscapes, and tools. The symbolism rested on something real. After the war, Finnish cinema and television returned to themes that ordinary people could understand. Police series showed crimes that were concrete and believable. Officers relied on reasoning and human contact instead of technology. Conversations and intuition mattered more than data.

Comedy played an equally important role. Finnish humor was often self-deprecating, slightly absurd, and warm. It recognized the silliness of human life, the everyday mistakes and misunderstandings that made people human. You could see clear differences between men and women, between generations, and between the city and the countryside. These were not treated as problems but as natural parts of life. Even moral or social struggles were approached through lightness and irony. There was always a sense that life was imperfect, but that was precisely what made it real.

Children’s shows from earlier decades carried similar depth. Pelle Hermanni featured an alcoholic clown who was tragic but kind. Muumit told stories that were simple on the surface but filled with layered meaning. They showed friendship, loneliness, death, and renewal. These programs did not hide life’s darker aspects. They assumed that children could understand them. There was respect toward the viewer, even the young one. The stories trusted that people could face what is difficult, and find meaning in it.

Today the situation is very different. Modern media, including children’s programming, has become sterilized. Negative emotions are removed, conflicts are softened, and all characters speak in the same neutral tone. It is as if discomfort itself has become forbidden. Shows try to create happiness by eliminating all traces of suffering, but the result is hollow. Happiness turns into a fleeting state of stimulation rather than a meaningful experience that grows through contrast. In many cases, it is not even happiness but a kind of emotional anesthesia that hides emptiness.

Modern entertainment has also turned outward. Finnish television no longer shows the small and familiar but imitates the global. Crime shows are modeled after international formats, and reality series follow people chasing fame or extreme experiences. The emphasis is on what stands out, not what endures. Everyday life has disappeared from the screen. The characters are either flawless or broken beyond recognition, with little in between. The world they inhabit feels detached from reality.

Even the visual language of film has changed. Earlier works had pauses, silence, and slow pacing that allowed thought to form. Modern media is fast, fragmented, and dependent on constant stimulation. The viewer is not asked to reflect but to react. This is not only a question of style but of consciousness. The speed of images mirrors the restless pace of the society that produces them. When the rhythm of life becomes mechanical, the rhythm of storytelling follows.

The deeper shift lies in how media now functions as part of the system’s feedback loop. It no longer observes reality but maintains an illusion of it. What we see on the screen is a simulation of life designed to prevent reflection on the real thing. The screen world presents coherence where none exists, offering symbols of happiness, progress, and success without substance. The result is not escapism in the old sense but a form of managed perception.

When the credits roll, nothing remains. The stories do not stay in memory, because they were not built from real experience but from a sequence of symbols and effects. The viewer returns to life feeling emptier than before. The silence after the show feels uncomfortable, because the mind has forgotten how to exist without the noise.

In the old films, silence was part of the story. It was the space where meaning could grow. In modern ones, silence is avoided at all costs, because it reminds us of what we have lost.

Inversion of Human Drive

There was a time when being driven meant being capable. It meant being able to build, to create, to endure, and to rely on oneself. It meant initiative, not ambition for its own sake. Today the meaning has been inverted. When people speak about driven individuals, they usually mean those who climb the ladder of politics or business, those who know how to navigate the system, how to present themselves, how to move within structures that already exist. These people are called motivated, visionary, or leadership material, but most of them are nothing of the sort. They are driven only by compliance. Their energy is not directed toward understanding the world but toward fitting into it.

In Finland this inversion can be seen clearly. Those who are called driven are often the ones most comfortable inside the bureaucratic order. They go from university to politics or from management programs to corporate offices. They learn to repeat the right words about innovation, sustainability, or growth, yet they create nothing tangible. Their entire existence depends on layers of infrastructure and delegation. Their work is symbolic and their achievements measured in abstractions. They attend seminars, write strategies, and sit in meetings where nothing happens except the exchange of approval. The system calls them productive, but their productivity consists of maintaining the illusion that the system still functions.

The truly driven people are elsewhere. They are the craftsmen, farmers, fishers, small entrepreneurs, and builders who still depend on their own skill and determination to survive. Their drive is not based on ambition but necessity. They take responsibility for what they do, because no one else will. They work directly with matter and consequence. When they make a mistake, they see it and feel it. There is no symbolic layer to hide behind. These people have not abandoned their human capacity to act and to understand. They are grounded in the real.

Modern society has made their existence almost impossible. Every regulation, tax, and technological dependency pushes them toward extinction. The system demands participation in its abstractions and punishes autonomy. To be driven now means to comply, to accept dependence as normal, and to adapt one’s will to the rhythm of the machine. Those who succeed in this environment are not strong but flexible in the worst sense of the word. They bend until they no longer have shape. They no longer work to build or sustain anything real, but to manage impressions, data, and reputations.

The office worker who spends a lifetime in front of a screen managing information that does not belong to him, who claims ownership of results produced by others, who cannot repair a door or plant a seed, is now called an achiever. The word has lost all meaning. The idea of being driven has been reduced to endurance in a meaningless environment. It no longer refers to the fullness of life but to the capacity to function inside a hollow system.

The inversion is complete when the system begins to reward those who suppress their instincts of self-reliance and punishes those who preserve them. Those who adapt become the model citizens, while those who question are framed as failures or extremists. The human drive, which once meant the will to act, create, and think independently, has been turned inward. It now fuels the machinery that drains its own vitality.

What we call success today is often a form of surrender. To be driven in the modern sense means to silence the voice that asks what the work is for, what the life is built upon, and what is lost in the process. It means to accept the boundaries of the system as the limits of reality. In that sense, the modern driven person is not a builder of anything, but a caretaker of decline.

The real drive still exists, but it has gone underground. You can find it in people who resist being shaped entirely by abstraction, who insist on producing something real with their own hands or minds, even if the world no longer rewards it. They may be few, but they are the last traces of what human vitality once meant.

Loss of Ground

Modern Finnish society, like much of the West, has entered a phase where identity itself has become abstract. The idea that a person can be anything, regardless of biological or material constraints, reflects a deeper change in how people relate to reality. The same forces that have detached thinking from lived experience have also detached the self from its natural foundation.

In earlier times a person’s sense of self was shaped by tangible realities such as family, work, land, and community. These provided boundaries that gave identity coherence. Today those boundaries have dissolved. People live and work through symbols, screens, and administrative systems. Their experience of life is mediated by representations, not direct participation. The result is a growing belief that the self too can be redesigned like a symbol. If money can exist without gold, perhaps identity can exist without biology.

This way of thinking is most visible in educated urban environments where daily life is furthest removed from physical necessity. The less contact people have with tangible work or natural processes, the more they begin to treat reality as something negotiable. They do not grow food, build, repair, or produce anything lasting. Their work is often administrative, digital, or performative. Meaning becomes harder to find in such conditions, and the search for purpose shifts inward into identity, emotion, and ideology.

Universities have become the main environment where this abstract worldview reproduces itself. Many academic fields no longer study the world as it is but reinterpret it through social theories that deny the existence of objective limits. Students learn that all categories are constructs, that everything is fluid, and that truth is a matter of perspective. These ideas would not hold power if society still had a strong material foundation, but they fit naturally in a culture where nearly all labor and communication occur within artificial systems.

Those who live more materially grounded lives, such as farmers, builders, mechanics, and others whose work depends on the physical world, are often portrayed as less intelligent or less enlightened for rejecting these ideas. But their skepticism comes from experience, not ignorance. They operate in a world where things either work or they do not, where matter resists imagination. Their sense of self remains tied to practical reality, and this connection protects them from certain illusions.

The belief that identity is infinitely malleable is not a sign of freedom but of detachment. It reveals how far modern society has drifted from tangible life. People try to restore meaning by reinventing themselves, but the result is only deeper confusion. A culture that loses its grounding in the real eventually begins to mistake symbols for substance and in doing so forgets what it means to be human.

PART IV: CONSEQUENCES 

Era of Ugliness

In Finland, architecture and the built environment once reflected a direct and tangible relationship between people and their surroundings. Early dwellings were shaped by necessity, available materials, and the skills of those who built them. Construction was guided by practical knowledge rather than theory. Houses were made by hand from local timber, designed primarily for warmth and survival. The work was guided by experience, by how wood behaved in cold, wet, and wind. Every joint, roof, and wall carried the understanding of generations.

Early Finnish housing was simple, but it was coherent. There was a balance between effort, material, and purpose. Roof angles were calculated by experience to withstand snow, walls were thick to retain heat yet breathable. People lived according to the rhythms of light and season, and the architecture followed that same logic. The placement of the house on the land, the direction of the windows, and even the distance from the sauna or storage building were based on environmental awareness, not regulations or blueprints.

As people became more settled and farming replaced the semi-nomadic slash-and-burn cycle, homes began to evolve. Chimneys replaced the open smoke holes of earlier huts, allowing cleaner air indoors but also reshaping the way interiors were organized. Heating efficiency and family life improved, and with that came the first signs of aesthetic development. When survival was less immediate, people began to decorate.

Paint and ornament entered daily life. The colors used, yellow, red, white, and ochre, were practical but also symbolic. They came from minerals and natural sources: red from iron oxide, yellow from ochre, white from lime, and black from soot. These tones were durable and reflected the Finnish environment, warm against the cold, bright against the dark. A yellow doorway or vestibule often symbolized light and holiness, and the color red, particularly common in rural houses, represented vitality and protection.

Distinct regional styles developed over time. Western Finland, influenced by Swedish administrative and cultural structures, favored geometric balance, straight lines, and restrained ornamentation. The symmetry reflected an emerging social order shaped by law and governance. Eastern Finland, which retained older traditions longer, produced houses with carved window frames, brighter colors, and more individualistic ornamentation. There the house still carried something personal, an expression of the family’s identity and skill.

These stylistic differences did not arise in isolation. Finland absorbed influences from earlier civilizations through Sweden and continental Europe. Classical elements such as columns, arches, and pediments were adapted into local forms, appearing as decorative pillars at the corners of farmhouses or the triangular gables inspired by Roman temples. These motifs traveled through centuries of reinterpretation, passing from the Mediterranean through European royal architecture and eventually into rural Nordic craft. In Finland, they became simplified and human in scale, transforming the grandeur of empire into the dignity of the household.

The materials used also tell the story of development. In the beginning, houses were made from logs with interlocking corners, fitted by hand without nails. Later came sawmills, iron nails, and tools that made more complex structures possible. Roofs evolved from straw to wooden shingles and finally to tarred boards. Floors, once bare ground, became plank. Furniture appeared, at first built into the walls for stability, then as movable pieces. The interior began to reflect not just necessity but taste and aspiration.

By the nineteenth century, a rural hierarchy of houses existed. Wealthier farmers built large two-story farmhouses with symmetrical facades and painted exteriors. Poorer families still lived in smaller cottages but often imitated the same decorative forms. The houses themselves became markers of status and continuity. Even small details, the placement of a window, the use of molding, or the choice of paint, carried social and cultural meaning.

These developments were slow but steady. The key difference from later times was that every change still had a direct connection to the environment and the person who built it. The craftsperson and the inhabitant were often the same person, or at least part of the same community. The work was not outsourced to strangers, and the materials were never imported from far away. The result was a landscape that reflected a coherent way of life, local, practical, and beautiful through its honesty.

Beauty was not an addition to function, it was the natural outcome of proportion, care, and understanding. A well-built home did not need to prove itself aesthetically, because form followed use and material. The line between the practical and the aesthetic had not yet been broken.

Industrialization disrupted this continuity. Buildings were no longer made by craftsmen who understood materials and proportions but by contractors and companies focused on cost and speed. The introduction of industrial materials like concrete, steel, and sheet metal changed both the process and the result. The natural variations of wood were replaced with repetitive, machine-produced forms. Ornament disappeared, and aesthetic values were replaced by economic calculations.

In the 1950s and 1960s this transformation accelerated. The period known as the Turku disease became symbolic of what happened across the country. In Turku and other cities, entire neighborhoods of beautiful wooden and brick buildings were demolished to make room for standardized apartment blocks and office buildings. New ones were built instead of investing effort in renewing the old, and much of the process was surrounded by corruption and political influence. This was justified in the name of modernization and efficiency, but the result was a built environment dominated by grey concrete and glass boxes that could be produced quickly and cheaply but lacked all character and permanence.

The same pattern appeared in industrial and commercial construction. Factories, warehouses, and offices began to follow identical designs based on efficiency and flexibility. They were intentionally made so that any business could move in without modification. The logic of replaceability replaced the logic of craftsmanship. A building no longer represented its maker, owner, or community. It represented a system that prioritized functionality and economic turnover over meaning.

This shift in construction and design reflects a broader social change. The built environment now serves the logic of management, not the needs of life. Cities are planned to store people, not to connect them. Residential areas are built as uniform zones where individuality is expressed only through brand choices, not through structure or design. Public buildings such as schools, hospitals, and government offices follow the same formula: rectangular, flat, and indistinguishable.

Living in such spaces has consequences. People adapt to their surroundings, and when those surroundings are dominated by grey, uniform, and impersonal structures, thought itself becomes narrower and less imaginative. When the eye no longer sees complexity, it forgets how to look for it. The loss of beauty produces emotional fatigue, a condition where people stop caring about their environment because it gives them nothing to care about.

Earlier societies understood that beauty and structure were not luxuries but forms of stability. A well-built house or a decorated facade carried cultural memory and identity. It connected the individual to something larger than themselves, family, craft, or community. Modern architecture has broken this link. Its goal is no longer to last but to be replaced.

The result is what can be called the era of ugliness. It is a condition where the physical environment mirrors the alienation of the society that built it. The emphasis on speed, profit, and standardization has erased the aesthetic intelligence that once guided human creation. Instead of forming spaces that inspire and support life, we have built structures that reflect disconnection and emptiness. The surroundings no longer express who we are but what we have become, efficient, replaceable, and detached from reality.

Evolution of Art and the Growth of Abstraction

The history of art reflects the gradual transformation of human society, technology, and symbolic understanding. When we look at early art carved from stone or wood, we can see how directly it was connected to material life. These early works depict animals, people, tools, and recognizable behaviors. They were created by individuals or small communities that lived separately from one another, yet the images they produced were understandable across vast distances. The meaning was shared, and the forms were simple but powerful. Many of these early works likely had a ritualistic or communal purpose. They were not only decoration but part of a practical and symbolic relationship with the natural world. The representation was grounded in what people experienced directly.

As societies became more complex and techniques developed, art began to change in both form and meaning. The appearance of metalwork shows how craft required new kinds of cooperation and technical understanding. Producing artistic objects was no longer the work of a single person but often depended on resource gathering, trade, and shared knowledge. Art still depicted animals, people, and scenes of life, but it also began to show a higher degree of symbolic thought. The new materials and methods allowed for more complexity, and this reflected social changes as well. As people’s lives became more structured around technique, the artwork mirrored this structure. It began to express ideas of status and hierarchy, and the symbols used in art became less about the natural world and more about the organized world humans had built. Representations of the sun, cosmic shapes, or labyrinths began to appear, showing that art was starting to represent abstract ideas about life, the universe, and human existence.

In later periods, art reached a stage where it combined material realism with symbolic depth. Paintings became highly detailed and realistic, showing people, nature, and human activity with precision. Yet at the same time, they incorporated complex mythological and religious themes. To fully understand them, one needed knowledge of the myths, stories, and cultural background they referenced. Many paintings depicted scenes from Christian narratives, Finnish folklore, or classical mythology. The characters represented universal archetypes that appeared across cultures: heroes, mothers, gods, and tricksters. These archetypes created continuity between different societies, revealing how human imagination follows similar patterns. The structure of these myths and paintings depended on contrast, constraint, and context. Art at this stage represented not only what was seen but also the underlying principles of how humans understood their world and their place in it.

During the rise of modern nation-states, art gained a new function as a political and ideological tool. It was used to express collective identity and shared struggle. Symbolism became more direct, linking art to historical events and national stories. For example, a painting showing a woman holding a law book while an eagle tries to take it away carries a clear message. The woman represents the nation, the book represents the law or common order, and the eagle represents a foreign power threatening that order. To interpret such works, viewers needed to understand not only the archetypal symbols but also the political and historical context. Art now functioned on several levels: aesthetic, symbolic, and ideological. It became a medium through which people could express their collective values, fears, and hopes. At the same time, art became technically more advanced, with new geometric precision, use of perspective, and increasingly complex visual language.

As industrial society developed, art began to change again. The relationship between artist, material, and audience shifted. Industrial production and new technologies expanded what was possible, but they also introduced new constraints. Art became more abstract, less tied to shared stories or recognizable forms. The viewer was no longer expected to see a common meaning in the work but to interpret it subjectively. In this sense, art reflected the growing complexity and fragmentation of modern life. It was no longer a shared language but a field of individual expression. At the same time, art became increasingly shaped by systems of production. The logic of industry, including efficiency, scalability, and cost, began to influence design, materials, and aesthetics. Public artworks, such as sculptures placed on roundabouts, illustrate this shift. Many are abstract and mass-produced, lacking depth or a clear connection to history or community. They represent the system’s ability to produce form without meaning.

In the contemporary period, art has become both more abundant and more detached. It exists in digital form, spread across screens and networks rather than crafted from physical materials. It is often used for commercial purposes rather than symbolic or communal ones. Colors, shapes, and images are designed to attract attention or sell products rather than to convey shared meaning. The same principles apply in music, design, and advertising, where aesthetic techniques are used to manipulate desire and emotion. Art has become part of a continuous production cycle rather than an independent expression of life. While technology has allowed more people than ever to create and share art, it has also made art more dependent on technological systems. Its existence relies on digital infrastructure rather than physical interaction. The result is a condition where art is everywhere but often feels empty. It has lost some of its grounding in human experience and collective symbolism.

This does not mean that good art no longer exists. There are still works that carry meaning, beauty, and craftsmanship, both in traditional and modern forms. Some industrial or digital works can be moving and well-made. However, the overall trend shows a loss of coherence and depth. As production has become more refined and efficient, art has often lost the imperfections and individuality that once made it human. The evolution of art reveals the broader pattern of civilization itself: as systems grow more complex and abstract, the link between symbol and reality weakens. Art began as a shared expression of life and has gradually become a reflection of the systems that sustain it.

Energy and the Loss of Coherence

Finland has always been a country of energy drawn from its own land. For centuries, forests provided both material and warmth. Wood was burned in fireplaces and stoves, saunas were heated with logs, and small industries like tar production and smithing used wood-based fuels. Energy was tangible, something people could see, touch, and manage with their own hands. Water and wind were also used in simple forms, mainly to turn mills and saws. The movement created by water or wind was transferred directly to mechanical systems, without conversion or loss. The cause and effect were clear.

Industrialization changed this relationship completely. Energy was no longer something produced locally for local use but something centralized, measured, and distributed. Coal and oil replaced wood as the main sources of heat and power. Hydroelectric dams were built across the country, turning rivers into managed resources. Later, nuclear power plants were introduced, and electricity networks expanded to connect even the most remote regions. Every house, factory, and community became tied into one system. The landscape changed as power lines spread across fields, lakes, and forests. The country became physically and economically dependent on an infrastructure that was no longer human in scale.

Today, Finland has entered a new phase of energy production. The focus has turned to renewable sources, especially wind power. What began as local experiments has grown into an industrial operation. Large parts of the countryside are now dominated by wind farms. These structures rise high above the treetops, visible from tens of kilometers away. Beneath them, roads are widened, forests cleared, and foundations of concrete poured deep into the ground. The process that once produced clean mechanical movement from nature has become one of the most intrusive forms of industrial activity in rural Finland.

The problem is not only technical but systemic. Wind power is presented as clean energy, yet its production process involves large-scale environmental modification. The construction of turbines requires heavy machinery, massive amounts of concrete and steel, and constant maintenance. Blades erode over time, releasing particles into the air and soil. Noise and low-frequency vibration spread through the surrounding environment, disturbing both people and animals. The impact is real and measurable, yet official reports often describe it as insignificant. This is because the entire framework of evaluation has become detached from physical reality.

Environmental assessments are written by consultants paid by the companies that build the turbines. The models used to calculate emissions or noise are based on theoretical averages, not direct observation. Regulators rely on these same documents, because the technology and its scale have become too complex to assess independently. The process turns into a self-referential cycle where paperwork replaces reality. If a study says there is no problem, then no problem exists. Local experience and observation lose all authority.

The goals used to justify these projects are described with words that sound positive but have lost their real meaning. Terms like sustainability, green energy, and environmental responsibility are repeated endlessly, yet they often describe the opposite of what happens. Sustainability now means clearing forests, covering fields with concrete, and building structures that cannot sustain themselves without constant industrial input. Green technology is rarely green at all but grey, built from steel, plastic, and rare minerals mined from elsewhere. The same pattern can be seen in how these projects are presented as environmentally friendly, even though they destroy the very ecosystems they claim to protect. The language has become a shield that hides the damage, turning destruction into progress through carefully chosen words. 

A deeper issue lies in ownership and responsibility. Many wind power projects are built on land that local people believe they own but legally do not control. Modern land ownership is an abstraction defined through contracts and registration systems, not physical possession. A foreign company or an investment fund registered in a tax haven can acquire rights to build massive energy structures on Finnish soil, often without meaningful consent from nearby landowners. The government provides the necessary permits, infrastructure, and subsidies. Roads and power lines are built using public money to serve private operations. Once the projects are completed and profits have been extracted, the companies often disappear or change form, leaving no accountable owner behind. The landscape remains scarred, but the responsibility has dissolved into the structure of the system itself.

The electricity itself rarely benefits the regions where it is produced. Most of it is sold into the European energy market, where it becomes part of a trading system detached from any particular place or person. It can power industrial facilities, data centers, or hydrogen production plants that operate far from where the energy originates. Local communities are left with the noise, the altered landscape, and declining property values, while the profits move elsewhere. Even the sale and purchase of electricity now happen in simulated markets through algorithms that react to price signals in milliseconds.

This system reflects a larger pattern of abstraction. Energy production has become a financial and technological process rather than a practical one. It is managed through regulations, subsidies, and certificates rather than through the physical balance of need and supply. The people making the rules often have little understanding of the technical or environmental consequences. What matters is compliance with frameworks and models, not the condition of the land or the people who live on it.

Finland’s energy landscape shows the contradictions of the modern economy. A system that claims to reduce environmental harm has created new forms of destruction that are harder to see and harder to measure. Forests are cleared, ecosystems disrupted, and rural life diminished in the name of sustainability. The noise of turbines never stops, the lights on their towers blink through the night, and the power lines cut through once-intact landscapes. The entire process is managed from offices and data centers that have no connection to the places they reshape.

Energy in Finland began as a direct relationship between people and nature. Today it has become a structure of dependence and disconnection. The system operates efficiently, but without coherence. What was once a practical act of survival has turned into a vast, symbolic network of extraction and control. The electricity still flows, but the understanding of what energy is and where it comes from has almost disappeared.

Crisis of Proportion

The events that began in 2019 shaped Finland in a way that revealed how fragile the foundations of our society have become. What started as a medical situation turned into a political, social, and psychological crisis that changed how people viewed the state, institutions, and even each other. It was also a demonstration of how deeply dependent we have become on systems that interpret reality for us.

The official response was filled with contradictions. The public was told that hospitals were full and the system on the verge of collapse. Later it was revealed that much of the capacity remained unused. People saw conflicting images: news showing chaos and overcrowded hospitals, while in Finland many wards were calm or even empty. Nurses appeared in social media videos dancing in hospital corridors, while others claimed they were working to exhaustion. These mixed signals created confusion, and trust in public communication began to erode.

Restrictions were implemented unevenly. Entire regions such as Uusimaa were isolated, while rural areas remained mostly unaffected in practical terms. Businesses were closed or allowed to operate based on arbitrary definitions of necessity. Restaurants and small service companies were hit hardest, while large chains and digital platforms continued as usual. People were told to stay at home, limit movement, and avoid contact. The social fabric that holds communities together began to break down.

Schools moved online. Students were forced into digital environments where most of their social contact disappeared. Many teachers struggled to adapt, and families were left to handle the burden. Children who already had difficulties in learning or lacked supportive environments fell further behind, while those who were already independent sometimes improved their results. The experiment exposed how unequal and fragile the education system had become.

When vaccines were introduced, they were presented not only as medical solutions but as moral obligations. People who accepted them were portrayed as responsible citizens, while those who questioned them were treated with suspicion. The right to decide about one’s own body became secondary to public pressure and employment rules. In many workplaces people were forced to choose between their job and personal decision. The atmosphere of fear and moral superiority replaced open discussion.

Government institutions and corporations worked together under the label of emergency management. Contracts worth billions were made with pharmaceutical companies without public debate or transparency. The European Commission ordered large quantities of vaccines from a few multinational companies, often under unclear circumstances. The same pattern appeared in Finland, where oversight was limited and critical information hidden behind official secrecy. The same experts who advised on regulation often had direct ties to the industry. This blurred the line between science, business, and governance.

The media repeated official statements with little independent verification. Alternative opinions were dismissed as misinformation even when they came from qualified professionals. The climate of fear and conformity made rational debate almost impossible. People began to behave according to what they were told rather than what they observed. The difference between reality and its representation became nearly invisible.

The consequences were long-term. Many small businesses never recovered. Children and students lost important developmental years. Psychological stress increased, especially among the young. At the same time, public trust in institutions weakened, but dependence on them grew stronger. The crisis accelerated the centralization of power and decision-making and made people more accustomed to being managed through fear and regulation.

In hindsight, the crisis was not only about health but about proportion. A society that loses its ability to assess reality through practical observation begins to act according to abstract fears and imposed narratives. The measures taken were often excessive or inconsistent, yet people accepted them because the systems they depend on had already replaced personal judgment. What failed was not medicine or science, but the capacity to see the difference between what is real and what is represented as real.

The years after the crisis showed how quickly collective reasoning can collapse when institutions stop responding to feedback from everyday life. The population was divided, the economy distorted, and people became even more disconnected from the tangible world. The crisis did not create this condition, it only made it visible. What collapsed was the balance between reality and the structures built to interpret it.

Everything Crisis

I do not read newspapers anymore. The headlines change, but the story never does. The same problems repeat under new slogans and the same experts explain how things are improving when everyone can see that they are not. People seem determined to pretend that everything is fine, that we live in prosperous times, that small adjustments or better management will eventually make things work. If the economy slows down, people say that it is part of the cycle, that it has always recovered before. Few are willing to admit that what we face now is not a temporary downturn but a deep structural decline.

Most of my adult life has unfolded under this illusion. I have grown to see that there are almost no real alternatives left. The system has removed them. It is no longer possible to live self-reliantly or trade one’s own produce and labor in a meaningful way. Everything depends on larger networks of infrastructure, finance, and supply chains that are beyond anyone’s control. Work has become the only way to maintain basic economic stability, even when the work itself is meaningless or destructive. People complain that the young do not know how to do anything practical, yet they are also told that education has never been better. We are said to have both a shortage of labor and mass unemployment at the same time. Schools designed to produce obedient workers can no longer even do that effectively. The system has lost feedback between what it demands and what it produces.

What we are living through is not a crisis of one sector but a crisis of everything. Farming is in crisis, healthcare is in crisis, education is in crisis, and so is the economy that once supported them. Families, birthrates, and communities are collapsing. The countryside has been in crisis for decades, and now even the cities are hollowing out. Infrastructure decays while bureaucracy grows. Environmental policy creates more destruction than it prevents. The entire foundation of life in this country has been weakened. What remains stable exists only as an abstract layer of numbers, debt, and administration that no longer reflects what happens in reality.

The economy functions through loans that will never be repaid, supported by belief rather than production. Healthcare, education, and public welfare continue to exist only because the state borrows more symbolic money to fund them. These numbers on screens are treated as real wealth, yet they represent nothing tangible. The country is not solvent in any practical sense, but it continues because everyone agrees to believe in the illusion. The difference between what is real and what is symbolic has become irrelevant. People talk about fixing the situation, but their thinking remains inside the same abstraction. They move numbers, adjust taxes, change retirement ages, or invent new accounting methods to make the public finances appear stable. No one wants to face the fact that the foundation itself has already cracked.

We live in a contradiction where bankruptcy and abundance exist at the same time. Money is spent on projects that mean nothing to the people who live here, but they satisfy the moral logic of the system. Billions go into symbolic initiatives that serve no real purpose beyond appearing virtuous. It does not matter whether anything improves as long as it looks good on paper. People have begun to seek safety inside the same illusions, investing in stocks and cryptocurrencies that are equally detached from the real economy, hoping that this virtual wealth will protect them when everything else fails.

When solutions are discussed, they always come from the same symbolic structures that created the problem. The European Union, the central banks, and global institutions are treated as saviors even though their policies have deepened the dependency. People cannot think outside of these structures anymore. If you criticize them, you are labeled as ignorant or populist, as someone who does not understand how complex things have become. Complexity is used as a defense against accountability. The less people understand, the more they are told to trust.

The irony is that those most detached from reality are seen as the most intelligent. The people who build the next layer of abstraction are called innovators and experts. They create more distance between what is real and what is managed, and the system rewards them for it. Expertise itself has become an industrial product. Universities and governments produce experts like factories produce goods, each specialized in a narrow field that no longer connects to the whole. They are specialists of fragments, blind to the structure that unites them. Asking them to fix what is broken is like asking a machine to explain why it was built.

Sometimes it feels like living inside a mental institution where the most delusional are in charge. Those who still recognize what is real are dismissed as outdated or irrational, while those who design new ways to ignore reality are celebrated. The more symbolic and detached a person’s work, the higher their social status. The result is a country that continues to function on paper but deteriorates in every tangible way. We live inside a simulation of prosperity that depends entirely on belief, managed by experts who no longer know what they are managing. It is not one institution that is sick, but the logic that binds them all together.

Abstraction of Identity

In modern Finland, it has become impossible to separate questions of identity from the broader systems that manage and define life. The country is experiencing a demographic shift that is more structural than numerical. The population still grows in numbers, but its composition has changed. The native population forms an inverted triangle, with fewer children born each decade and a large aging generation above them. This decline is not visible in statistics yet because immigration fills the numerical gap. People come from nearby regions such as Estonia and Russia, but also from East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. The country that was once socially and culturally cohesive has become a site of rapid transformation.

This transformation is not only demographic but symbolic. It reflects how systems of governance and ideology use abstraction to reshape human life. The language used to describe these changes is built from ideas such as diversity, inclusion, and equality. These words are repeated until they lose their concrete meaning. Diversity, in practice, does not increase variation but reduces it. Cities around the world begin to look the same, filled with the same shops, food chains, and imported lifestyles. A street in Helsinki resembles one in Berlin or Brussels. Cultural differences are marketed as variety, but they exist within a single homogenized system of production and exchange.

In this process, the meaning of belonging has been replaced by administrative categories. Being Finnish has shifted from a shared culture and continuity to a legal status or symbolic affiliation. Citizenship has become an abstraction that anyone can adopt, regardless of the deeper connection to the land, language, or history. This is not an attack on individuals but an observation of how the system redefines people as interchangeable units. A person’s value is determined not by their role in a living community but by their capacity to participate in the larger economic and administrative framework. The same person can be moved across borders, industries, or institutions without meaningfully belonging anywhere.

The logic behind this development is efficiency. For a complex system to function smoothly, differences must be standardized. The more unified the rules and categories, the easier it becomes to govern people and move them between places. Ideals of equality and freedom are used to justify this standardization. The result is a form of social flattening where local culture, dialect, and behavior are treated as obstacles to progress. People become fragments of data rather than members of a community. Their relationships are temporary, often mediated by digital systems. The family, once a stabilizing institution, is now seen as optional or even burdensome. Mobility and flexibility are presented as virtues, but they create instability and detachment.

This ideological framework also reshapes how people think about themselves. When identity is treated as a personal construct, detached from biological, historical, or cultural context, it becomes another expression of the same abstraction that defines modern economics or technology. People are encouraged to reinvent themselves indefinitely, to identify with any category or idea they choose. The concept of self becomes fluid to the point where it loses coherence. This creates tension between those who still experience identity as something rooted and those who experience it as something chosen. The resulting society is not diverse but fragmented.

Technology has made this possible. Airplanes, ships, and digital communication allow people to move and interact at scales never before imaginable. Yet these same tools erase the significance of place. The ability to be everywhere has also made people belong nowhere. Globalization has created a world where borders exist legally but not practically, and where human relationships are mediated by screens, contracts, and networks. The same process that once connected communities now disconnects them from their roots.

What emerges from this development is a condition where people live in physical proximity but moral and cultural distance. The system depends on this arrangement because it creates citizens who are easier to manage. A population without shared continuity or identity cannot resist direction from above. It becomes self-regulating, aligning its values with whatever the dominant system demands. Words like inclusion or unity are used to give moral justification to what is essentially a process of integration into a single symbolic order.

Finland, once defined by its coherence, now reflects this global condition. Its institutions, media, and political structures speak in the same language of managed diversity and abstract equality. The contradiction is that as society becomes more inclusive in theory, it becomes less connected in reality. The promise of universal belonging conceals a deeper loneliness. What once tied people to their community, land, and tradition has been replaced by categories that have meaning only within the system that created them.

The abstraction of identity is therefore not a moral failure but a structural one. It is the outcome of a civilization that has learned to organize everything through symbols and administration rather than presence and experience. As the system grows, it erases the local in favor of the global, the concrete in favor of the abstract, and the rooted in favor of the replaceable. In this sense, Finland’s demographic and cultural changes are not unique but part of the same global trajectory.

Fragmented Man

In recent years, a wide variety of male movements and public figures have appeared in Finland. Most of them draw their influence from the United States, where political, cultural, and religious life produce a constant stream of material about how to become a man, how to attract women, and how to improve oneself. Some of this content has spread through Europe, but the core influence is still American. What began as individual advice has become an entire digital industry built on self-help, fitness, psychology, and ideology.

The range of this culture is vast. There are figures like Jordan Peterson who attempt to give meaning to modern life by secularizing Christian thought, and others like Joe Rogan who act more as cultural observers than leaders, but whose influence functions in a similar way. There are political movements, bodybuilding communities, self-improvement groups, and those who promote travel, wealth, and freedom as substitutes for deeper meaning. Some of these people have genuine intentions. Others are driven by money, ideology, or confusion. Yet they all share a similar feature: they rarely look at the structure of the world itself. They treat the crisis of men as an individual failure rather than a systemic one.

Many of these movements tell men that the solution is to work harder, build muscle, earn more money, or gain status. They do not ask why these things have lost their meaning. The result is that men chase ideals that no longer have a place in the modern world. The constant pressure to improve creates exhaustion, anxiety, and despair. Men compare themselves to unrealistic models of success, and when they fail to reach them, they feel worthless. What is presented as empowerment becomes another form of control.

This crisis is not limited to individuals. It reflects how society itself has changed. Modern life has become highly feminized in structure. Institutions value compliance, communication, and emotional management more than physical or technical skill. Schools reward stillness and verbal ability, qualities that favor girls. Boys are told that competition and assertiveness are harmful. They are expected to behave according to standards that contradict their natural instincts. Over time, many lose confidence and direction.

The same pattern continues in adult life. Work has become symbolic, detached from tangible production. Bureaucracy, management, and digital labor dominate. The craftsman, builder, and farmer have been replaced by administrators who trade in words, data, and appearances. The modern economy provides almost no room for the kind of masculine independence that once gave men a sense of purpose. At the same time, media and politics promote contradictory ideals: men are told to be gentle but decisive, strong but equal, confident but never dominant. The result is confusion and paralysis.

Relationships between men and women have also suffered. Ideologies built around equality have created a social atmosphere where men are afraid to express interest or initiative. In schools and homes, boys are often taught by women who repeat ideas about gender sameness that contradict reality. They grow up believing that men and women think and behave the same way, only to discover later that attraction and relationships do not follow these rules. Many become timid and passive, trying to please rather than lead, which only deepens their frustration when they are rejected. Others respond with anger and resentment.

A small number of men try to escape the system entirely. Some retreat into solitude or virtual worlds. Others move toward self-sufficiency, physical work, or spiritual practice. A few rediscover meaning through tangible life, reconnecting with nature or manual skill. But these paths are rare, because they require turning away from the entire structure of modern existence. Most men remain caught between exhaustion and guilt, unable to find coherence in a world that treats masculinity as a threat and dependence as virtue.

The crisis of men is not only personal or cultural. It is structural. The environment in which masculinity once had meaning has been replaced by a system that no longer requires it. Protection, strength, and provision are now handled by institutions and technologies. The social role of the man has been outsourced to the machine. The drive that once built civilizations has been neutralized, and what remains is a simulation of ambition.

If there is a way forward, it begins with recognizing that this situation is not natural. It is the product of an artificial environment that rewards conformity and punishes independence. The restoration of balance will not come from self-help routines or political movements, but from rebuilding the link between life and its tangible foundations. Real strength begins when men stop performing for systems that no longer need them and start creating for themselves and those they love.

Loss of Silence

Silence used to be part of everyday life in Finland. It was not something you searched for or paid to experience. It was simply there. You stepped outside your house and heard the sound of wind in the trees, a dog barking far away, maybe a woodpecker or the creak of snow under your boots. Between those sounds there was space. That space, silence, was the background of everything and it gave rhythm to life.

Today that silence has mostly disappeared. Even in the countryside there is constant background noise. In cities it is never quiet. There are machines humming, cars moving, people talking, screens buzzing, airplanes crossing the sky. I used to live in the city because I thought it was what you were supposed to do. Everyone said that is where opportunity is, where life happens. Looking back, I can only describe it as being brainwashed. I was miserable, anxious, sleepless, detached. I could not connect to anything meaningful. My days were filled with noise and my thoughts never stopped.

I began taking walks just to find a moment of peace. I went to small forest patches, lakeshores, anywhere that looked quiet. But even there, there was always something. Distant traffic, someone shouting, a siren, or the faint hum of electric lights. The silence I was looking for no longer existed. I realized that it was not just about the city but about the whole environment we now live in. Noise has become the background condition of modern life.

When I finally moved back to the countryside I thought I had escaped it. In some ways I did. Here you have space around you. You can breathe. You are not surrounded by people or constant movement. But even here the silence is not real anymore. Fighter jets fly overhead often enough that the windows shake. The main road can be heard over tens of kilometers away, especially during quiet summer nights. At night you can see the light pollution of towns and car lights stretching far into the distance, especially when the sky is cloudy.

The wind turbines have changed the landscape too. Their red lights flicker through the night and even from tens of kilometers away you can feel the low hum of their rotation if you listen carefully. It is said you cannot hear them from this far but you can. The noise is not loud, but it is constant, an invisible vibration that never leaves the air. The forest beneath them is cleared, roads are built, and cables run across the land. It is hard to describe how deeply this breaks the feeling of being in nature. The landscape feels wounded.

During the day there are tractors, chainsaws, and machinery, all necessary for work and survival here, but still part of the same larger noise. Even by the lake you hear the whine of motorboats in summer and the sound of snowmobiles in winter. There is no longer a place where you can simply exist without being reminded of the system that surrounds everything.

This constant sound affects people more than they realize. It keeps the body in a state of low-level tension. People forget what real quiet feels like. They think they are relaxed when they are not. When they finally experience silence they cannot stand it. Their minds panic because there is no stimulation left. The silence feels empty to them, not peaceful. They have become addicted to noise without even knowing it.

Silence has become a luxury product. People now pay for retreats, noise-free hotels, or guided digital detox weekends to experience what used to be normal. The system destroys the conditions for silence and then sells fragments of it back as therapy. It is the same logic that defines most of our lives now. The system creates the problem and then sells the solution.

This is not just about sound. It is about what silence means. When silence disappears, so does reflection, patience, and connection to reality. Silence allows people to sense their surroundings, to think clearly, to understand where they are. Without it, life becomes a blur of signals. Even when the body is still, the mind is filled with noise, notifications, opinions, politics, endless digital chatter. There is no rest anymore, because there is no space between things.

We are surrounded by noise, light, and constant movement, both physical and virtual. Our homes, our towns, and even our countryside are filled with it. The natural world that once gave us calm and renewal has been turned into a network of production, transport, and communication. There is no real darkness at night and no real silence during the day.

People talk about sustainability and well-being, but there is nothing sustainable about a life that never stops. Silence is more valuable than gold because it cannot be manufactured or replicated. It is the condition where life can return to balance. Losing it means losing the ability to feel what is real. Without silence, people lose not only peace but also the depth of their own existence.

That is the real cost of progress in Finland, not only the forests cut down or the soil destroyed, but the silence erased from the land, the noise that has entered our minds, and the fact that we no longer even notice what we have lost.