The coronavirus crisis has upended the lives of virtually everyone around the world, including in Finland.
People are faced with many worries that simply didn't exist less than a year ago, including quarantines, government restrictions and safety guidelines as well as furloughs and job losses.
However, according to a recent survey, at the same time, people in Finland appear to be significantly less concerned with personal issues than they were over the past couple of years.
An Yle-commissioned survey, carried out by polling firm Taloustutkimus and consulting company IROResearch over the past few years, asked respondents how concerned they were about their own health, livelihoods and the affairs of loved ones.
Compared to figures from similar surveys in 2018 and 2019, respondents were much less likely to say they were worried about those personal issues during the very extraordinary year of 2020.
Respondents still had concerns at the personal level this year, but fewer were likely to say they considered them to be significant.
Survey shakeup
For example, in the previous two years of the survey, around 20 percent of respondents said they were "very concerned" about their own health and that of their loved ones. But this year, the proportion who said the same was less than 10 percent.
"Usually there are not such major changes in this survey, so the result is exceptional," Taloustutkimus' research director Juho Rahkonen explained, noting that the research methods were similar to previous polls and the results were comparable.
Some of the questions were worded slightly differently, which may have had some impact on the answers.
"However, [the changes] were not enough to make such a significant difference, and there must be other factors behind them," Rahkonen said.
Similarly, the survey found that people were far less "very concerned" about the situations of family and friends, with nine percent of respondents saying so this year, compared to about 20 percent in 2018 and 2019.
One question that saw the least amount of change was about peoples' opinion regarding their ability to have the energy to continue working. This year, 12 percent of respondents said they were very concerned about their abilities to stay in the workforce, just a few percentage points less than the roughly 14-15 percent who said the same the past couple of years.
Face-to-face with uncertainty
"Rarely does an opinion researcher encounter such a situation where opinions change so much, but on the other hand, the situation around the world has changed completely over the past year," he continued.
Author and anthropologist Miia Halme-Tuomisaari wrote a book about the effects of the pandemic on people's daily lives and said she thinks the coronavirus crisis has made people examine their lives from a different perspective.
"Covid has put us face-to-face with uncertainty and forced us to accept that we can't control everything. Minor things that may have seemed very significant a year ago may seem a bit less worrying now," Halme-Tuomisaari explained, saying the development may be part of a coping mechanism so that people can deal with new concerns.
"Living in a state of constant emergency is very stressful and it seems that [previous] perceptions settle into new ones. Certain situations, which at times seemed exceptional, become normal," she said, noting that similar developments have been seen in studies on people living in refugee camps.
Halme-Tuomisaari said that research has shown that people living in chaotic environments end up adjusting and establishing new perceptions of normal life very quickly.
She said that this year's survey results were surprising to her, but also were positive.
"It is a good reminder that we have resources to cope with exceptional circumstances," Halme-Tuomisaari said.
Making room for new problems
Jenni Savonen, a social psychologist at Helsinki University, said she wonders whether the change in attitudes might be based on how people might be comparing their personal problems to those of others.
She noted that as a nation, Finland has so far handled the crisis comparatively well and that the overall situation in the country has been slightly better than elsewhere.
"This might make people feel that they don't have similar worries and should be satisfied with the situation," she said, adding that people may feel that such concerns are unjustified as things are worse in other places.
The broad effects of the pandemic can also displace people's own problems, Savonen explained.
"In the face of crises, people usually surprisingly act in solidarity and the [feeling of] community grows. In other words, the idea may be that one's own concerns are not so important right now, because there's a larger crisis going on," she said.
In 2020 the survey queried 1,149 respondents, while 3,000 people participated in 2019 and 2,237 answered the questions in 2018. This year's survey was carried out on 27-30 November.