The Finnish Art of Silence

In England, I was trained from birth to fill silence. We all were. It’s practically in the cultural DNA. If there’s a pause in conversation, you jump in with something about the weather. If you’re standing next to someone in a lift, you make a comment about the lift. If you’re at a bus stop, you remark on the bus. The content doesn’t matter. What matters is that no one has to endure the terrifying void of two people existing near each other without making noise.

Then I moved to Finland, and silence went from being a problem to being a feature.

The Bus Stop Revelation

My first real encounter with Finnish silence happened at a bus stop in Helsinki. I’d been in the country about four days. I was standing there with three other people, waiting for the 66 to Lauttasaari. In England, this would have been a natural small-talk situation. “Bit cold, isn’t it?” “Think the bus is running late.” “Lovely scarf.” Something.

Nobody said a word. The four of us stood there in the cold, evenly spaced about two metres apart — the famous Finnish bus stop distance that the internet loves to joke about — staring straight ahead, saying absolutely nothing. The bus came. We got on. We sat in separate seats. Silence.

I remember thinking: have I done something wrong? Is there something on my face? Are Finnish bus stops governed by some rule I don’t know about?

No. That’s just Finland. And the more I experienced it, the more I realised something: it’s not awkward silence. It’s comfortable silence. The Finns aren’t being rude. They’re just not performing sociability for its own sake.

The Office Surprise

The workplace was another adjustment. In Manchester, office culture was built on chatter. Morning greetings, desk-side gossip, the “how was your weekend” ritual every Monday. You couldn’t walk to the printer without having three conversations.

In my Helsinki office, people said “moi” (hi) in the morning and then got on with their work. The open-plan office was quiet. People wore headphones. When someone needed something, they said it directly and concisely. There was no preamble, no “sorry to bother you, but…” no elaborate softening of the request. Just: “Raymond, can you send me the project timeline?” Done.

At first, I interpreted this as coldness. I thought my colleagues didn’t like me. I spent about two weeks convinced I’d made some terrible faux pas and everyone was too polite to tell me. Then I went for after-work drinks with the team and discovered that these same quiet, reserved office people were warm, funny, and genuinely interested in getting to know me. They just didn’t see the need to demonstrate that every five minutes during the working day.

One colleague, Antti, later explained it to me beautifully: “In Finland, we think it is rude to waste someone’s time with words that don’t mean anything.” That sentence rewired something in my brain.

The Lift, The Sauna, The Forest

Once you start noticing Finnish silence, you see it everywhere. In lifts, where people stare at the floor numbers with the intensity of someone disarming a bomb. In saunas, where you can sit next to a stranger in near-darkness for twenty minutes and exchange perhaps two words, and that’s considered a good social interaction. In forests, where Finns go specifically to be surrounded by quiet.

The forest thing is particularly telling. Finns have this deep relationship with nature that often manifests as simply going into the woods and being still. Not hiking with a podcast on, not chatting on the phone, not even necessarily walking. Just standing among trees. Breathing. Being quiet.

I tried it one weekend. Drove out to Nuuksio National Park, found a quiet spot by a lake, and sat on a rock. Just sat. No phone, no book, no agenda. Just me and the trees and the water and whatever thoughts wanted to show up.

It was one of the most restful hours of my life. And I understood, viscerally, why silence matters to Finns. It’s not the absence of something. It’s the presence of something — space, peace, room to think. Room to simply exist without performing.

What I’ve Learned About Finnish Friendships

Here’s the thing that nobody tells you about Finnish social culture: the friendships are deep. Really deep. It just takes longer to get there.

In England, I could meet someone at a pub and be best mates by the third pint. We’d exchange numbers, make plans, and then slowly drift apart because the connection was a mile wide and an inch deep. Fun in the moment, forgotten by next month.

Finnish friendships don’t work like that. The getting-to-know-you phase is slower. You might work alongside someone for months before they invite you for coffee. But when a Finn lets you in, you’re in. These aren’t people who cancel plans or ghost you or make promises they don’t intend to keep.

My friend Jari and I barely spoke for the first three months we worked together. Then one day he asked if I wanted to go fishing. We drove to a lake in his car, sat in a boat for four hours, caught nothing, and spoke maybe fifty words total. It was one of the best days I’d had in Finland. We’ve been close friends ever since.

There’s a Finnish proverb: “A word is a word, but silence is understanding.” I didn’t fully appreciate that until Jari and I sat in that boat, perfectly comfortable saying nothing, and I realised that not all connection requires noise.

Learning to Shut Up

The biggest personal change Finland has brought me is this: I’ve learned to be comfortable with silence. In my own head, in conversation, in life.

I used to fill every gap. Every pause in a conversation was an opportunity to jump in with something — a joke, a comment, an opinion. I was terrified of dead air. Looking back, I think I was terrified of what would happen if I stopped talking long enough to actually think.

Finland cured me of that. Slowly, and not always comfortably, but thoroughly. I now let pauses happen. I let conversations breathe. I’ve discovered that some of the best moments in any interaction are the ones where nobody says anything and you just sit with another person in the quiet.

When I go back to England now, I notice the noise. Everyone is talking, all the time. In shops, on streets, in restaurants. The relentless chatter that I used to think was friendliness now sounds a bit like nervousness. Like everyone is afraid of what might happen if they stop.

It’s Not Unfriendliness

I want to be clear about this because Finland gets a bad rap sometimes. Finns are not unfriendly. They’re not cold. They’re not antisocial. They’re just selective about when and how they communicate. They speak when they have something to say. They’re quiet when they don’t. And they extend the same courtesy to you — they won’t fill your ears with noise you didn’t ask for.

It took me a while to see this as courtesy rather than distance. But now I do, and I think the Finnish approach to silence is one of the sanest things about this country. In a world that’s getting louder every year — notifications, social media, 24-hour news, everyone with an opinion on everything — there’s something radical about a culture that still values shutting up.

The Finns figured this out a long time ago. The rest of us are just catching on.