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Notes -
Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.
Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!
I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).
The sunlight hours theory is suspect. I would expect them to have adapted to it over the millennia, the same way they evolved lighter skin. Meanwhile, in places with ample sunlight, people do their best to avoid it: historically in the form of the siesta, nowadays awake but in an enclosed, air-conditioned space.
They aren't avoiding indirect sunlight though. In Scandinavia shit gets really dark for most of the day during winter.
You go to school/work when it's dark and you leave after the sun has gone down. You go months without really seeing the sun even if you live far south of when the sun literally doesn't go up during the day like in Kiruna, Narvik or Tromsø.
I have plenty of family far in the north of Sweden and they meet a ton of people who try to move there. Those people usually worry about that cold but that is almost never an issue, the cold is easy to deal with. The reason people leave again is because they don't understand just how dark it gets and how that really feels.
All that said, I also find the sunlight theory suspect on similar grounds to you. It's not like people are trapped there and there is no statistically significant difference in suicide rates based on latitude once you control for how rural a county is. People are killing themselves in the countryside, not the cities, and even that is greatly affected by demographic differences.
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