On Worry, and What the Icelanders Have That We Don't

Anyone who has spent time in Reykjavík has watched some version of the following scene. A woman, mid-afternoon, on a road by the harbour. Two small children, one in each hand. The wind has come in off the Atlantic the way it does — without warning, without manners, without intention to be brief. The boats knock against their moorings. The smaller of the two children is complaining about something. A hat, perhaps, he does not wish to wear. The woman, by every visible indicator, is having a difficult afternoon. As she passes the corner she says something to the children that the wind takes most of, and what one catches, repeated twice, is þetta reddast.

It is a small phrase. Two words. The loose translation, in dictionaries, is it will work out.

In 2021, Iceland was named the second-happiest country on earth, the Finns once again narrowly displacing them from the top. This is, on the face of it, a peculiar fact. Iceland is a small island of fewer than four hundred thousand people, sitting just below the Arctic Circle on a tectonic seam that occasionally produces volcanic eruptions. Its winters are long. Its summers are short. It was hit, perhaps harder than any other country in the developed world, by the financial crisis of 2008, in which a banking system several times the size of the national economy collapsed in the course of approximately one weekend.

The standard explanations for the country’s contentment, low crime, robust welfare state, high social trust, are not wrong. They are simply not the whole story. The fuller story is that Icelanders appear to carry, embedded in their everyday speech, a philosophical instrument that helps them hold difficulty differently than the rest of us.

That instrument is þetta reddast.

It does not mean no worries

The temptation, on first hearing it, is to file þetta reddast as Iceland’s hakuna matata — a pleasant lyric, easily printed on a tea towel, gently lazy. To do so is to underrate it. Hakuna matata, as a slogan, is fundamentally optimistic; it imagines a future in which there are simply no problems. Þetta reddast concedes, more honestly, that there will be many. The flood will come. The volcano that has been quiet for eight hundred years will erupt unannounced beneath a glacier. The bank, against all available reason, will fail. Þetta reddast does not claim that these things will not happen. It claims, more modestly, that one will, in some form, get through them.

The distinction matters. Optimism is a position about reality. Acceptance is a position about oneself. The Icelanders are not, in any sustained sense, optimists about the weather. They have lived, for a thousand years, in a place where the weather is a serious adversary. They have, instead, made a private peace with the fact that the weather will continue to be the weather, and that one’s job, as a person standing in it, is not to outrun it but to walk through it.

Hence the woman with the two small children, leaning into the wind on a Tuesday afternoon, saying, twice, þetta reddast.

A small relief that English does not provide

There is a related idea in older Western thought, although we have largely lost the vocabulary for it. The Stoics called it amor fati — love of fate — by which they meant not resignation but a kind of fierce welcoming of whatever came next. The shape of þetta reddast is, broadly, the same shape, redrawn for everyday speech: a way of agreeing, in advance, to whatever turns up. The difference is that the Stoic version was written in books, and required reading, while the Icelandic version is taught in kitchens, and requires only listening.

This is the part the English language, on reflection, struggles with.

We have, in English, a strong vocabulary for problem-solving, an emerging vocabulary for self-care, and almost no vocabulary at all for the very specific psychological move of accepting a circumstance one has not chosen. Resignation is too defeated. Acceptance is too clinical. It is what it is is too tired. Don’t worry is, on the evidence of one’s own life, almost always counter-productive: it merely names the worry, and makes it twice as embarrassing. Þetta reddast is something else. It is a small wager, made aloud, that one will, in the long arc, manage. It is the surrender of the fantasy that one’s worry is part of the solution.

It is the difference, in everyday weather, between watching the storm and walking through it.

A whole country, taught the same line

Surveys put the figure at just under half of Icelanders saying they use the phrase regularly. Almost all of them report having been taught it, in childhood, by a grandparent.

A country in which a sizeable majority of the population has been verbally inoculated, from infancy, against the reflex to catastrophise — and which, by the way, also happens to be the second-happiest country on earth — is perhaps not entirely a coincidence.

It is, of course, doubtful that one can fully import an idiom one was not raised inside. Þetta reddast, spoken in English by an English speaker, in an English supermarket, where the queue has not moved for seven minutes, sounds — let us be honest — affected. But the idea behind it is portable. The idea is that one’s relationship to the difficulty of life is, in part, a question of what one has been taught to say to oneself. That a phrase, repeated often enough, becomes a posture; and that the posture, in time, becomes a temperament.

A more useful definition of happiness

The woman on the road by the harbour did not look, in any obvious way, happy. She was, however, walking calmly through a storm her body language suggested she had walked through before, and expected to walk through again, and that, in the meantime — twice over, þetta reddast — was not going to ruin her afternoon.

This may, in the end, be the more useful definition of happiness.