Ashamed of Home

A dual citizen's reckoning with Finland's retreat

I’m a Finnish-Australian dual citizen. For most of my life, that first part has been a quiet source of pride. Not chest-beating nationalism - Finns don’t do that - but a steady confidence that my other home country punched above its weight.

Education. Design. Technology.

A society that worked.

I feel a little bit less of all that now; and I also feel shame.

It’s accumulated in layers over recent months, this shame.

Small realizations and large ones. Let me walk you through them.

The ATM

Last week I did a cardless withdrawal from a CommBank ATM. Opened my app, tapped a button, grabbed my cash in seconds. Trivially convenient.

Finnish banks can’t do this.

This might seem like a strange place to start an indictment of a nation, but bear with me. In the 1990s, I was a software developer working on one of the world’s first comprehensive online banking platforms - for Leonia Pankki (which became Sampo Bank, then Danske Bank).

We were genuinely world-leading in that domain, and the mobile communications domain as well.

That banking platform I helped build? It has evolved precisely zero in three decades. Possibly gone backwards. Every time I have to use Finnish online banking, I want to weep. The country that helped pioneer digital finance now can’t figure out how to do a good banking UX.

This is what stagnation looks like: not dramatic collapse, but the slow death of failing to improve while everyone else moves forward.

The Spreadsheet

Nokia - my beloved former employer, the company that once put a phone in every pocket on Earth - has just implemented stack ranking.

For those unfamiliar: stack ranking is a performance management system that forces managers to classify a fixed percentage of employees as underperformers, regardless of actual performance. If you have a team of ten stars, you still have to label two of them failures. It’s a system that Microsoft abandoned in 2013 after recognizing it destroyed collaboration and incentivized sabotage. Ford dropped it. Accenture dropped it.

Everyone who tried it dropped it, because it’s not management - it’s institutionalized cruelty dressed up as rigor.

And Nokia is implementing it now. In 2025.

The European Works Council called it “completely against Nokia’s values.” Internal sources describe employees as “tyrmistyneitä“ - stunned. The system requires managers to designate 25% of their people as having “development needs” regardless of whether they actually do. Which means a quarter of Nokia’s workforce will lose their full annual bonuses based not on their actual performance but on a forced distribution curve.

This isn’t competent management. It’s the corporate equivalent of bleeding patients with leeches because you read about it in a book from a few decades ago.

The Gesture

Miss Finland lost her title after photos surfaced of her pulling her eyes into slits - the “slant-eye” gesture that’s been recognized as racist toward Asian people for as long as I can remember.

Bad enough. But then something worse happened.

Perussuomalaiset (the ironically named “True Finns” party) MPs Juho Eerola and Kaisa Garedew, along with EU parliamentarian Sebastian Tynkkynen, posted images of themselves making the same gesture.

In solidarity, they said.

Let that sink in. Elected representatives of the Finnish people deliberately performed a racist gesture, on camera, in support of someone who’d just lost a national title for that exact gesture.

The story has now spread across Asian media. Japan’s second-largest newspaper. Korea’s largest newspaper. Chinese state media. The BBC’s Chinese service. Eerola gave an interview to Asahi Shimbun promising to apologize “as many times as necessary“ - the hollow performance of contrition from someone who still doesn’t understand what he did wrong.

One Korean commenter noted the irony: Finns were themselves mocked as “Finngolia” and subject to racist caricature by Western Europeans within living memory. Now Finns mock Asians. The cycle of contempt rolls downhill.

The True Finns are part of the governing coalition.

This is the face Finland is choosing to show the world. FFS.

The Door

Which brings me to the policies.

Finland has, in the past eighteen months, systematically rebuilt its immigration system to be harder, crueler, and more hostile:

Citizenship now requires eight years of residence, up from five. Time spent waiting for asylum decisions no longer counts. Refugees - who previously could apply after four years - now wait the full eight like everyone else.

Work permits are revoked after three months of unemployment. Lose your job, and you have ninety days to find a new one or leave the country.

Family reunification now requires income thresholds that put it out of reach for many ordinary workers. A family of four in Helsinki needs nearly €3,000 per month net income before they can be together.

The “pushback law” allows border guards to refuse asylum seekers at the Russian border without processing their claims - a practice that may violate international law.

Voluntary departure “incentives” offer €5,300 if you leave within 30 days of your first rejection - a bounty system to accelerate exits.

Forced deportations increased 32% in the first half of 2025.

On one hand, the government has for years – no, decades – pined after skilled migration, because the ageing population bomb is about to hit Finland and hit it hard. For as long as I can remember, the reality on the ground has been quite different and not one of a warm welcome.

Now the message is very clear: you are not welcome here.

The Pattern

Banking stagnation. Management cruelty. Public racism. Institutional xenophobia.

Four data points; not the only data points by any means (government trying to save its way to salvation would be another one, but that’s a story for another time), but enough for something to boil over for me.

In isolation, I might have been able to dismiss any one of them as an aberration, but all together, they tell a story, and I do not like that story.

Finland is a country that built its modern reputation on being ahead of the curve - in education, in technology, in social policy, in trust. A small nation that proved small nations could lead. And whether warranted or not, I derived a certain measure of pride from that.

What I’m watching now is a country that’s abandoned that project. Not dramatically, but through a thousand small retreats. The innovative spirit calcified into bureaucracy. The egalitarian instinct curdled into in-group protection. The famous Finnish reserve - that quiet confidence that let us ignore what others thought - perverted into a wall that keeps others out.

I used to explain Finland to Australians with pride. The education system. The design sensibility. The way things just worked.

Now I find myself making excuses.

Countries don’t have souls, but they do have trajectories. Finland’s trajectory, right now, is pointed somewhere I don’t want to follow.

I’m not renouncing anything. That’s not how love works, even disappointed love. But I’m done pretending the emperor has clothes.

Grow the fuck up, Finland.