Iceland's Water Cure | Hacker News Reader

Iceland's Water Cure

nytimes.com

124 pointswallflower37 comments

I'm an Icelander and I quite like this article, it is one of the better written pieces I have seen on a cultural phenomenon I relate with - and it is no exaggeration, swimming pools are quite central to our culture. I have two young kids and I take them to an outdoors swimming pool nearly every week, also in the wintertime. Since I live in the capital area we have a few swimming pools to choose from and we rotate between them.

The title hints that this is the reason for the country's high score in happiness surveys such is this one: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/denmark-happi... . While I don't think it's that simple I can forgive the author, the title "A survey on Icelandic swimming pool culture" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Usually when I see these surveys the first question that pops up is "How do they measure that?" and it seems journalists generally are not to keen on pursuing that question.

My point is that isolating one thing from a culture and pinning that down as a "cause for happiness" seems a bit silly to me. But apart from that the article is pretty accurate.

I did car trip around Iceland few years ago in may, having most of inner part still unreachable due to metres of snow. Running tiny Chevrolet Spark in places like Western fjords on their dirt roads with meeting car overy 1-2 hour, good memories. Communal pools could be found in most small villages around, I recall a big one in Akureyri, second largest city (population 18,000). Definitely part of the culture and considering overall ridiculous prices there, pretty cheap.

But all pools are standard treated clean water although whole island has natural hot springs with bluish hot water coming straight form he ground all over it (it's basically like a big volcano all over). Very few places to enjoy those. I guess tourists want to have different experiences than those living there.

>second largest city (population 18,000)

Could a SMALL population increase bonding / a sense of belonging amongst countrymen thereby creating happiness?

I would definitely agree with that. In the US large parts of the country seem fairly alienated from each other. Not only do they seem to not be able to relate to each other but often times actively vilify. I have only lived at the West coast which largely seems at odds which some other parts of the country. Parts of the South come to mind immediately. The circumstances people live I seem so very different and thus are their needs and concerns. I rarely meet people who have social bonds to the South who fondly talk about them. I fact that might have never happened. For contrast on Iceland life also send to be very different if you live in Reykjavik rather than I a farm in the rural South East. However, even during my few visits I've heard people talk about how they will go to their cousins farm in spring scabs help with the lambs. I think that that kind of relationship is needed to keep political discussions from resulting in discontent if there is a conflict of interest. That's something that send took be lacking their larger the country is. Originally being from Germany I found my home country to be somewhere I the middle in this regard. There sometimes would be a little bit of conflict between regions but never even close to the almost dehumanizing things I hear in the US.

> I have only lived at the West coast which largely seems at odds which some other parts of the country. Parts of the South come to mind immediately. The circumstances people live I seem so very different and thus are their needs and concerns. I rarely meet people who have social bonds to the South who fondly talk about them. I fact that might have never happened.

I think that might be an artifact of living on the West coast: the Southerners you meet are likely to be those who hated the South, hated their neighbours, hated their families — and moved as far away as they could. Believe it or not, a lot of folks love the South: good, decent, kind people who take an interest in one another (of course, if one is neither good nor decent nor kind, that wouldn't be appreciated, and if one is private then one might find them nosy).

Everyone's different.

It felt like Icelanders made sitting in a hot tub a national sport, which was fine by me when I visited. My son and I walked over to Vesturbæjarlaug a few times and it was great.

I love Iceland. I visited only once, but I might go back again in July. It would be great to connect to some HN Icelanders that live there, like you, and meet when/if I visit again. My details are in my HN profile, and/or you can simply google me to find ways to contact me, if you'd like to.

I've been to Iceland and tried the pool, and it was one of my favorite experiences (well, pretty much the whole trip was a favorite experience, Iceland is amazing). It was very invigorating to stand up from the 35 C water into the 2 C air and back.

If you haven't tried it, you need to.

Can the secret to the country’s happiness be found in its communal pools?

If you use suicide rate as an indicator, Iceland doesn't seem to be so happy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Iceland gets next to no sun November-February, leading people to depression, drinking, etc. It would likely affect you much more than the winter you know from other countries.

If anything, the social aspect of going to a hot pool in the winter is likely to keep people from committing more suicides.

Should be remembered too that cultural taboos have a big impact on whether suicides will actually be reported as such.

Exactly. It also affects how people commit suicide too. If there is a big cultural taboo against suicide then people will choose ways that look like accidents - say driving under a truck.

This explanation of little sun => suicides doesn't work, at least as directly as most would think:

Research on seasonal effects on suicide rates suggests that the prevalence of suicide is greatest during the late spring and early summer months, despite the common belief that suicide rates peak during the cold and dark months of the winter season.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_effects_on_suicide_ra...

Lack of sun causes more people to be depressive. Non depressive people are happier during late spring and early summer. Seeing other people happy increases the tendency to suicide in depressive people.

People with some level seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and people with depression react to change differently.

For people suffering from SAD symptoms typically start in the fall and stay during winter months. For people with clinical depression it's the springtime that throws them off.

I live in Finland and I have clear SAD symptoms in the fall and winter (very tired and low energy). Using Philips light therapy lamp completely fixes it for me as does trip to Spain in the winter.

As somebody that lives somewhere where SAD is a real thing, I can perhaps offer a glimpse into this. During the winter, it's so dark and cold, you get depressed. You stop going out, and you stop socializing. It's not that bad, at least you don't feel so worthless for not going outside since everything is awful outside.

Then spring comes along and everyone starts going outside. The weather is very good now. Everyone is having fun. Everyone but you. You are still stuck inside, afraid to come out, all depressed. That's the point where suicide start to seem like an option.

If that was true, Iceland's neighbors Norway and Sweden would have similar rates, but they're actually significantly lower and closer to countries like the USA. Iceland also has the highest percentage of people on anti-depressants in Europe. Nearly twice the rate of the EU average to be exact!

I think a lot of these "Isn't Iceland wonderful" articles are poorly sourced pop-science junk designed to get ad impressions. Iceland has a lot of problems and is a much more complex country than many give it credit for. Its not a bunch of elf worshippers living in the forest. They're a complex modern people with all the problems modernity brings. I also believe a lot of people with leftist political beliefs don't want to discuss the downsides of the Scandinavian welfare state as these criticism are, of course, critical of their own personal politics. So narratives that are critical of these politics don't get upvoted on sites like HN and Reddit which are largely left-leaning.

Its also worth mentioning that national happiness is tied very closely with income inequality, not pools. Even then, you can have a high level of general happiness and still have a relatively high suicide rate for reasons not fully understood, but I imagine self reporting of how 'happy' you are isn't granular enough to really tell us very much.

There's an ugly "noble savage" narrative to Icelandic people that I personally find offensive. I wish the media would stop pushing that narrative but I can understand that it gets ad impressions the same way Native American "noble savage" stories were so popular a hundred years ago in the USA. The reality is that both are reductionist and inaccurate and gloss over the very significant negative aspects of both their cultures.

Cites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264183896-en/03/11/in...

http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/25/why-the-happiest-state...

Can people who are down voting this please explain edgy? I find the comparison to neighboring counties very ingesting and would like to hear why people disagree.

> If that was true, Iceland's neighbors Norway and Sweden would have similar rates

Keep in mind that their borders stretch much further south. Also the population distribution is biased towards the south.

Sure, saying that national happiness comes from pools is silly. But it doesn't change that their pools are amazing in many ways. After living in northern IS for a while, that's one thing I really miss.

It's likely that countries that experience the most depression have also developed and iterated through a range of cultural cures. We can all learn something from them.

more suicides means less depressed people walking around, so that could make a happier society.. (suicide boots from Futurama anyone?)

Suicide and suicidal ideation seem to act as a transmittable disease. At least that's what indigenous populations in the US are facing, an epidemic of suicides brought on by the loss of loved ones to earlier suicides.

The flippant comment about a cartoon show is unwelcome from my perspective.

On the other hand, it seems that suicide rates correlate poorly with results in research on happiness.

For instance, compare the results of Happiness Research Institute to the suicide rates. Some of the countries with highest suicide rates are also the happiest!

http://www.euronews.com/2015/07/02/finland-tops-european-cou...

You can imagine an odd pattern might develop where countries that have high suicide rates seem happier because their most depressed people irreversibly exclude themselves from the surveys. I wonder how strong the statistical effect is though.

In the developed countries where suicides are more common, the suicide rate is about 1-2 % of total mortality. I don't think that's enough to have any significant Darwinian impact.

There is a band where people commit more suicides. To depressed and you can't really think or plan. To happy and you don't feel the need. So, oddly enough suicide is worse at the happy end of the depressed spectrum. Especially when someone goes from a deep to a more moderate depression.

A very interesting article. It made me look up some facts, actually. In Finland, there are 218 public swimming halls. There are 313 administrative districts (communes, towns or cities) in the country. Thus, practically even the smallest of the communes with population of only a few thousand have a swimming hall; big cities have several. Lacking geothermal heat, the pools are indoors and explicitly heated obviously.

This isn't generally talked about much. I didn't realize it myself before reading this article: Finland probably isn't famous for its swimming and swimming hall culture, but it's everywhere. Except for people who don't specifically like water practically grow into a culture of swimming at halls. Nobody really thinks much about it. Everyone knows how to behave there. Old people gather at swimming halls for bathing, swimming and aquajogging. Physical education classes at school swim at the local hall, kids are brought to swimming halls in the first year, regular people go to swimming halls to exercise... There's nothing much special about it. We swim outdoors, in lakes and the sea, mostly for fun but swimming halls are the place for a more focused physical exercise. I would assume Sweden and Denmark are similar, roughly.

I've had subpar experiences trying to find an abundance of swimming options when travelling abroad. My culture might not be that common after all.

Augh. Almost 100% unrelated to the article, but:

"There are ramshackle _cement_ rectangles squatting under rain clouds..."

It's concrete [1] not cement. Even the word cementing can mean "settle or establish firmly", which is what happens to the aggregate in concrete. Augh.

[1]: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/12/the-differen...

+1 for the information, but I don't think all the "Augh"s are warranted.

One of the widely accepted, dictionary definitions of "cement" is simply "concrete." (In fact, Merriam Webster has this listed as definition #1.) I understand that the terms have different technical meanings, but in common English they are simply synonyms.

E.g., http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cement

There may be an opportunity for a Battle of the Dictionaries here, but I think this skirmish in the language wars may be over.

Fair enough :/ it just feels like 'misusing' words is disrespectful to their source, as though a lack of effort was taken to use it 'properly' (air quotes since those are highly subjective terms). In a detached sense, I suppose seeing semantic change [1] in action is neat, but it is still just the tiniest bit depressing.

edit: Ah! Also cool is dental cement [2] which is, as the name would imply, used in dentistry (but without any aggregate equivalent!).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_cement

Totally agree. Even if "concrete" and "cement" can "properly" be used interchangeably, I myself prefer to use words in a way that recognizes these sorts of distinctions. It keeps language more information rich and historically connected. (And keeps me from being looked down upon by well-educated people who, like myself, incline towards language snobbery :))

A type of Japanese communal bath house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent%C5%8D

I cycled around Iceland in may of last year. Slipping into a hotpool after a day of pedaling against the wind in barely above freezing temperature was simply amazing.

Saturday in Icelandic is laugardagur - literally 'pool day'. Gives you an idea how central this is to the culture.

I thought it meant 'washing day' originally …

Geothermically heated water often contains lithium. This could contribute to the good vibes coming from the water.

Where exactly is my 'undercarriage'?

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