The Swedes have a word for it. Our writer finds out why.

Episode transcript

[MUSIC]

Erika Page: How do we move forward while honoring everybody’s individuality, but also with an understanding of our interconnectedness, and where is that balance? …[T]hat’s especially interesting to me about the concept of lagom. 

Clay Collins: That’s Erika Page, speaking from Madrid about her recent reporting from Sweden.

These are all Scandinavian features: clean design, safe cars, progressive child rearing, challenging weather, those striking national flags. There is, of course, much more, not all of it rosy, but a regional vocabulary exists that’s aimed at articulating ideals around ways of making well-being more central to life.

It’s not just a Nordic thing, there’s a South Korean term, meong, for staring into stillness, the Dutch have niksen (for doing nothing). But Nordic terms seem … catchier. Danes and Norwegians famously taught the world about hygge, creating coziness, and in Sweden there’s lagom, basically just the right amount, or, keeping things in balance.

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Erika Page, currently based in Spain, reported recently from four cities and towns across Sweden. She wrote a Monitor Weekly cover story on the lagom way of life and on its evolution or its fraying, depending on your perspective. 

Welcome back, Erika.

Page: Thanks for having me.

Collins: So first, could you fix my pronunciation and then maybe fine tune that definition a bit for us?

Page: Yeah, so it’s pronounced LAH-gome. You got it. You’re pretty close. It’s a word Swedes often use in everyday life. For example, um, How hot do you want your soup? Lagom. Not too hot, not too cold, but the sense of just right. 

Collins: It’s a “baby bear.” 

Page: Right, exactly. Lagom also points to something deeper in Swedish culture. It implies moderation, balance, and this sense of just enough. So Swedes, they tend to follow the rules. They tend to color within the lines. They don’t brag. And if you are successful, your success shouldn’t come at the expense of someone else. So there’s this implication of social harmony.

Collins: You have ties to Sweden, Erika, and you speak the language. How much did that help in you getting really immersed in this story?

Page: Yeah, so I’m not Swedish by blood, but I was born there and I spent my childhood going back and forth between my mom in California and my dad in Malmö in the south of Sweden. So I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I have a Swedish passport, but my Swedish isn’t amazing. You could say it’s lagom, just enough to get by if I need to.

But I was excited to report this story because it was likely to undo a lot of what I thought I knew about Sweden. I think it’s common for people outside of Sweden to have kind of this flat, even Utopian view on what life is like in Sweden. And having spent a lot of time there, I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew it was gonna be more complicated than that.

Collins: The last time you were on this show, it was to talk about your reporting in Uruguay, where generally, democracy gets an assist from a cultural proclivity for civility and respect, even where there are differences. And you know, models are nice, but most people understand that there are lots of reasons that models don’t easily cross cultures.

We’ll talk more about that, but first, even within Sweden, with its history of one for all non hierarchical collectivism, things have been changing a bit, haven’t they?

Page: They have. One thing I learned is that Sweden never had a feudal system, in the way the rest of Europe did, so you didn’t have this same strict sense of social hierarchy that you saw in other places, and so you do still see that legacy. I mean, a common observation about Swedish companies today is how flat their management structures are.

People don’t flaunt their wealth. Almost everyone is on a first name basis with everyone else. And then when Sweden really began to develop economically, and in a fundamentally capitalist way, that newfound prosperity was accompanied by a host of egalitarian policies to, in essence, maintain the social balance.

Page: So Sweden managed to find this lagom balance between capitalism and the social-welfare state. Then the country went through a financial crisis in the early 1990s and politicians across the political spectrum realized that perhaps the welfare state had become a little bit too much, that it was in some ways weighing down the system.

Since then, Sweden has reduced a lot of its social spending. Of course, there are some people who think that that’s needed, and there are others who say that the welfare state is being hollowed out. But it does seem like at this moment in history for Sweden as a country, Sweden is again trying to find its lagom.

One thing that was interesting in my reporting was that often I would have to explain a few times what I was getting at asking about lagom because it’s one of those words that people use so regularly without second thought in their daily life that they aren’t necessarily conscious of the philosophical or cultural underpinnings of the concept, but people who are from other places, have lived in Sweden, they were much more likely to say, oh yeah, this is something that’s really peculiar and interesting about Swedish society is this lagom way of doing things.

I also heard from people that they would really like for lagom to operate on a more conscious level of thought within Sweden because there is this sense that, yeah, maybe my grandparents generation really lived in a lagom way, maybe even my parents, but people feel like their peers may have lost sight of what lagom means for Swedish society and what it can look like and so there’s this desire to maybe even revive it in some ways to see if Sweden can find its collective narrative again through this shared understanding of lagom. 

Collins: Right. You mentioned egalitarianism and you write about parallel societies within Sweden – and on the face of it, that sounds positive, right? A form of diversification, really. And you talk about a reach back for lessons from the indigenous Sami people. I think there are some other words that come up in connection with that, but there are challenges with integration in a society that was homogenous for so long, right?

Page: Definitely, I think you’re right that diversity is a relatively new challenge for Sweden. Until recently, Sweden was more welcoming to migrants and refugees than most other European countries. But it hasn’t done a particularly good job integrating many of those newcomers into society, and that’s what has led to what the former prime minister has called parallel societies, where the Sweden that you live in is very different depending on the neighborhood.

You grew up in the community you grew up in, so you have this situation where young people from disadvantaged areas are geographically and culturally separated from the rest of the city with limited opportunities for, say, professional development. So it’s true that Sweden has seen an increase in gang-related violence, especially among young people, among those with immigrant backgrounds, although many of them were actually born and raised in Sweden, but many people I spoke with were equally concerned about the fear-mongering going on in Swedish politics, that it’s fueling racist narratives, and they’re really saying that immigration itself hasn’t been the failure, but integration has.

Collins: I wanted to ask about that fear-mongering, because … what’s your sense from your reporting of how real the concerns are, that are eroding public trust? I mean, a lot of it may be being whipped up by politicians….

Page: I think that is the case to a degree. Levels of trust are still high in Sweden, relatively speaking, compared to other countries. But I think the problem is that there is fear of it eroding. People will tell you that the welfare system is not what it used to be, although, of course, it’s still robust compared to most other places. There’s no question that Sweden’s political landscape has become more polarized in recent years, so that, in a way, undermines social trust as well. And as one source told me, when there’s less trust, lagom itself becomes more difficult because it’s easier to feel like no, this isn’t enough anymore.

I need more or someone else will come and take it. It becomes more difficult to cooperate. So my sense is that Sweden has a really strong foundation of trust and it just depends on how it weathers these current storms. 

Collins: There’s a tendency to want to size up which direction a society is moving. We’ve talked in your past two appearances on this show about looking for credible progress, both in the Points of Progress franchise, which we both have a long history with, and in that Uruguay story, how did you apply a Monitor lens while reporting this one?

Page: So, lagom may be a uniquely Swedish concept, but what was interesting to me, and I think to my editor, Trudy [Palmer], as well, was that it’s a word that in some ways encapsulates this universal yearning for balance, and that’s something I think is safe to say that a lot of people around the world in different ways feel is missing at the moment. Political discourse has grown extreme. Geopolitical tensions have broken out into unexpected wars. Even weather events have become more extreme, because of climate change, which itself could be seen as a symptom of an economic system that encourages excess rather than enoughness.

So I wanted to look at Sweden, this place that has a reputation for being really even-keeled, really-people centered. And I found that it’s not easy there either, but I met lots of people who are grappling with this question of, what balance means, what enough means, because they do care deeply about where society is headed and whether it will be a good place for their children to grow up.

I mean, I think about … Jokkmokk, the proposed site of a controversial new iron mine that I write about in the story. A Sami Indigenous couple I spoke with said lots of reporters had come by to ask them about the mine, but that no one had framed it in terms of what “enough” might look like for the town.

And they said that really got to the root of what was going on there. These competing understandings of. What the town needs to be OK, and I think that’s true as well at the national level for Sweden.

Collins: It strikes me that one thing you’re talking about is cohesion. Your kicker quote in the story was about the fact that as many individual definitions as there are about living as a Swede, there’s this prevailing sense that people are all somehow still on the same boat. And that’s a piece of lagom too, it seems. What can readers take away about that mindset and how it might apply to their own lives in their own cultures?

Page: I think that’s one of those fundamental questions of society. How do we move forward while honoring everybody’s individuality, but also with an understanding of our interconnectedness, and where is that balance? And that’s especially interesting to me about the concept of lagom – its ability to, in some ways, unite the individual and the collective. Because lagom is an inherently personal measure of enoughness. What is good and sufficient for you might not be what is good and sufficient for me, but at the same time, something isn’t lagom if it takes my needs into account, but entirely sweeps yours under the rug.

So there’s this necessary give and take that work together when things feel really lagom. And what I found in Sweden is that it’s a concept that can push people to consider for themselves what lagom might look like in their own corners of the world.

Collins: Interesting. Not a Utopia, but certainly something to strive for. 

Page: Right.

Collins: Thanks for coming back on, Erika. It’s just always a pleasure to talk with you.

Page: Thanks so much, Clay. 

Collins: Thanks for listening. You can find more, including our show notes with links to the story discussed in this episode and to Erika’s previous appearances at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.