Boring Sweden - Welcome to the Land of Duplicity
Welcome to the Land of Duplicity
Deep inside the archive of Daily Mail lies a column written by the Swedish journalist Helena Frith-Powell, in which she points out every faulty aspect of her home country for the world to read. She tells the story of how she came to acknowledge a world beyond her own nation and how mind-numbingly tedious her life had been prior to her outbound migration. “Welcome to Sweden” she writes, “a country of nine million people but so dull that even Sven-Göran Eriksson left.”
The article itself is heavily embedded in sarcasm, a writing behaviour so quintessentially British that the reader often forgets Frith-Powell’s true nationality. It possesses an amusingly humorous darkness which is rarely found in the works of Swedish columnists. And perhaps the column was meant to be that way; the fact that she doubtlessly chose to abandon her cultural identity in order to claim a new, ‘better’ one could possibly have part of what she was trying to imply.
It has been quite a while since Frith-Powell published her raw criticism of her home nation and ‘the list of everything that is wrong with Sweden’ has grown tenfolds since she left hers in the archive room ten years ago. The country has grown to become an aesthetic and cultural haven where the ordinaries are frowned upon. From up close, it seems like a beauty, but when it falls into comparison with the highly metropolitan society of Britain or the American west and east coast, the country’s most urban city of Stockholm does not stand a chance and you suddenly realise that Sweden is in a way a shallow creature in a postmodern shell, bearing a certain pretentiousness in its nature. It falls behind on originality with its monotone essence that undoubtedly sweeps the country.
The Swedish society is built upon a cold personality, induced by an immense amount of hubris of which the country denies having. It is not okay to say be proud of Sweden, but god forbid if you ever give someone a vase that is not labelled with “Orrefors”. The ugliness of claiming yourself as an anti-patriotic nation is how it causes duplicity to emerge as a side effect. The fact that the streets of Sweden are packed with hipsters who claim to be heroes of the environment, but cannot bare themselves to buy a pencil unless it comes in an exclusive plastic box is a downright definition of hypocrisy. Duplicity has become a trademarked trait that the country must carry - a dull society where the meaning of politically correct has expanded so vastly that the any topic regarding an individual has turned into a grey area.
A couple of months ago, Independent published the results from the Good Country Index poll in which Sweden topped at rank #1 above 162 other nation, making Sweden “the ‘goodest’ country in the world”. According to the poll, Sweden inhabited the most positive lifestyle in the world with a high profile on both social and personal well-being. From makes sense from afar - Sweden holds onto the essential building blocks of a successful society with its thriving international market and steady economy, but with it comes a dreadful dullness that cannot be described as anything but grey. “It’s as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life” , as American author Bill Bryson described it in his book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. And rightfully so.