Sisu

I’ve recently learned of a concept in the Finnish culture that I love so very much. They have a word, sisu, which is one of those great words that doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It means “grit, bravery, and determination to continue to work and do the right thing even in the face of long-term adversity.” It’s not “take your licks,” because it’s active. It’s not “grit your teeth and finish the race” because it’s long-term. And it includes an element of bravery because the long road is uncertain – but you do it anyway.

Sisu isn’t focused on a single task. Sisu is a lifestyle value. There is something in the human spirit that is worth preserving. There’s a philosophical thought experiment that goes something like this: “If you could step into a box that created a simulated perfect existence of constant pleasure and happiness with no effort on your part, would you go into the box?” You’d know it wasn’t real, but that wouldn’t affect your perception of it. If the ultimate goal of life is human happiness and flourishing, why not go into the box? People struggle with this question. It’s hard to honestly say you wouldn’t do it, hard to even come up with a reason why you shouldn’t, but something about it irks us. There’s something disturbing about the concept, isn’t there?

Part of me always thought it was just signaling, people saying “oh, I’d never use the box, it’s better to be real,” when they were really just saying that because they knew the box was hypothetical and they’d like to score status points with their peers by sounding high-minded. I used to think that if the box were real, those people would jump into it in a heartbeat.

Maybe some of them would. Heck, maybe I would. Pain, agony, loss, despair, loneliness, regret, grief, fear – these are all real things. Real things in my life, my mind, my heart. If something could take all of that away, isn’t that a good thing?

But something about it bothers me. Makes me wonder.

When I see people who have completely given themselves over to substance abuse – people who have gone into the bottle or the needle and never come back out – I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t want to do it, but believe me, I get it. Because that’s the box. I get it in the same way I understand people who are terminally ill who want assisted suicide. It’s different facets of the same concept. Sometimes a person looks at the hand they’ve been dealt, and decides that the “happiness machine,” in whatever form it takes, is a better offer than trying to make a go of life without it.

People struggle to come up with counter-arguments. Sit down with a terminally ill person in constant pain, or a completely destitute heroin addict, and try to convince them to step out of the box. The two tracks people usually take are to either reference loved ones (“think of everyone else who cares about you/who you’re hurting/etc.”) or a higher power, trying to reach out via religion. Sometimes these things work, but you can surely imagine plenty of situations where they simply wouldn’t apply. And what then? What do you tell that person that says, “No thanks, I’d rather just push in this needle and die, because that’s the happier outcome?”

There is something in the human spirit worth preserving. Maybe I feel that way because evolution naturally programs us to want to survive, and my belief that continued survival outside of the happiness machine is worthy of pursuit is simply a manifestation of that evolutionary programming. Or maybe there really is something deep within us that’s actually more important than our happiness. Maybe there is something at the end of that long road that is worth all the grief and despair you endure to get there, all the effort of the journey and the wear on your bones. Maybe the choice isn’t between happiness and sadness, and thinking of life in that way is what causes us to find our happiness machines and crawl into them, because happiness is obviously preferable to sadness. Maybe instead, we simply sometimes have to choose between happiness and sisu, and we choose the latter because it is good to survive. Because it’s good to endure, and take another step, and let your soul grow a little longer.