It's a good point about living in a hot climate often being associated with living a happy life. Although to what I've seen, there isn't much evidence for such a correlation.
Well I feel cold in winter sometimes even with a coat on. It hurts when I go outside, so I stay inside more, but if I stay inside too much, it hurts.
The point about hot environments is true, but people are not anxious and your body rarely hurts. They are lazy and their minds blank out. It is often too hot to do anything except try to scam anxious northerners and move away from mosquitos.
I grew up in northern Sweden. You're definitely miserable even when dressed perfectly in -15°C!
You're right that once it gets over +30°C or so, you'll be miserable whatever you wear. But there is a large temperature range below that that is wonderful. The Bay Area is almost always in that zone.
It's currently above freezing, dark, and wet here in Norway about 40 km south of Oslo. I'd be a lot more comfortable if it were -15 C. The sun would probably shine for more of the day instead of being hidden behind dark clouds and it would be dry; going for a walk would be much more enjoyable.
A Finn here. And just as many other finns, I'm confused to why Finland ranks at the top.
Yet, this seems like a case of someone looking to disprove a theory and thus finds the arguments. For example;
Health metrics isn't a good measure, considering that Scandinavia has free health care, and this leads to more cases of mental health issues are recorded.
Suicides aren't a great metric either, considering that Swedes and Finns have fairly high level of access to guns.
I do agree that happiness is a term that is difficult to define, and that "happiness" is a bit misleading. "Content" is a better description.
Also, I think it's easy to misunderstand the Finns from the surface of us. We don't exhibit happiness, and we don't express happiness in a way that is easily observed. Finland ranks at the top of trust in other people, and being one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Those two metrics are a hint into how we Finns relate to other people. Also, it's difficult to get to know Finns, and for this reason it's difficult for outsiders to understand the Finns and the mentality.
On the anecdotal side, earlier this year I solo-traveled the US for 4 weeks, and out of those I got into deeper conversations, I was struck by how sad people were. That made me more convinced that I live a very happy life, in a happy place.
Also regarding "comparison of suicide numbers", in many religious regions suicide is a problem for your soul and therefore a problem for your still-living relatives.
So there is a huge incentive for religious societies to let a family member's suicide appear like an accident. Suicide rates are an extension of mental health disease rates and extremely hard to compare without correcting for many factors.
"We don't exhibit happiness, and we don't express happiness in a way that is easily observed"
I would far rather live somewhere where people look unhappy but are actually pretty content with life than somewhere where people feel compelled to look happy even though they are actually feeling pretty miserable.
But then again I am an aging Scot so I'm biased. ;-)
That fuzzy line that sits between happiness and contentment is worth some exploration. For some the two are one and the same but for others “happiness” represents something closer to a perpetual Disney-movie-good-ending sort of emotional state that I suspect is broadly speaking unrealistic. I wonder how much sadness has stemmed from chasing that unattainable ideal.
You have a good point. I was about to write something about that in my previous point, like "Finns have a ladder that is lowers than others", but it didn't sound right. You put it with better words.
As a Murrcan greybeard now having lived more than half my life in Finland, I agree with your second-paragraph observations on the people and the mentality.
The level of societal trust here is still very high. I say "still" because methinks Western media and social media serve to erode such things. My 0.01€, YMMV.
Greetings from Finland. No deposit required for the carts, yet almost all carts are being returned (I can't remember when I last saw one not returned).
Wherever you are in Finland is more considerate than wherever I am in in Finland. Often when I arrive at my local Prisma there’s an employee outside wrangling abandoned carts.
As a Nordic person, that kind of income difference looks realistic (without having checked). But I could never had imagined the difference to be considered as dystopian. If we would dig deeper into this, I would expect our different views to have something to do with differences on what expectations we have, values in life and how we relate to inter-personal statuses.
At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe.
We will instead host it in Europe most likely.
I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.
This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
They require issuance of paper visas and an in-person interview. It's _easier_ than B1/B2 visas; but in the overall scheme of things not _that_ much easier.
For a person deliberately avoiding the US (whether out of principle or otherwise), I can't imagine a trip through customs for a transfer would be acceptable either.
That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)
I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.
Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.
No, he is right. Mexico still has an awful problem with the drug cartels that control whole regions and can actively undermine the government in the whole country. They just recently discovered a death camp that might explain where some of the hundreds of thousands disappeared people ended up.
But there are regions where hosting a conference would be possible, mexico city or Querétaro for example.
What is absolutely astonishing, however, is how similar they sound, at least in terms of prosody. To my Hungarian ears Finnish, at least if heard from distance, sounds eerily familiar.
Compare this to e.g. Spanish and French, languages so close to each other but sounding so different. I wonder if there is some deep reason why prosody is well conserved in the Finnish-Hungarian pair and apparently entirely meaningless in Romance.
