Umbrella-Stories and Unemployed People

Until some time ago the umbrella name for all various individual and societal versions of normal life was Modern.

Life becomes concrete by means of our ideas, thoughts, decisions and deeds, but all ideas, thoughts, decisions and deeds are based on meanings. They are preceeded by meanings, they exist as meanings and as meanings they can be modified, altered and changed.

However, meanings are not like Finns who can live isolated and far from each other and who prefer no contact with other people. Meanings form couples, families, networks of friends and business partners. Like Mediterranean people they live always in close contact with other meanings. No matter what specific meaning you would like to modify and re-define, you need to take into account the neighbouring meanings. If you make an effort to do something different, the neighbours nextdoor and futher away start sending messages to you.

If you do not voluntarilty take into account the neighbours´ messages, they will make you do so. An analogical situation takes place when the Finnish police knock on the door of the Spanish post-graduate students of technology having a birthday party at midnight. The noise level of the Spanish birthday conversation would be normal in Spain, but it is considered unacceptable here in Tampere, Finland. Neighbours react first. They alarm the officials and they are obliged to interfere.

Meanings live in families and networks. But it is no random life. Meanings need to be chained. Unless they are somehow chained, they cannot be expressed as talk.

Maybe you are lucky and happy and every now and then make love with someone very, very important to you. That taking place, you know that all meanings are not chainable. There are always meanings that are not reached or covered by words. It is as if they were escaping into the margin, waiting to be expressed in some later occasion, the next opportunity to embrace one another.

Anyway having been lucky, happy and willing to talk you might have exchanged some meanings with the other one. You have succeeded in arranging meanings to form sequences that have brought in some desired results. You know that the haphazard meanings need to be arranged and sequenced to follow some kind of shared logic. If the logic is not shared, communication becomes surprisingly complicated, if not impossible.

My friend is a professor of social psychology. She has done research on how people describe their normal life, what kind of hidden logic there is to be found in their descriptions.

In the 1990´s she interviewed unemployed Finns asking them how their life was. Maybe I need to remind you that we Finns live in the north and we are Protestants. This means that to be an accepted and honourable member of the society you need to work hard. This is due to the natural selection. Lazy people who did not get prepaired for winter have starved and frozen to death thousands of years ago. If you do not think of the future and if you do not get prepaired for the worst of it, you do not survive. This model has been duplicated generation after generation.

Being a Protestant means protesting. You can annoy even the Nature itself by staying alive just by doing the opposite that is expected of you. Instead of getting depressed and tired because of the continous requirement for hard work, you just enjoy working hard. You do it as a protest.

That is important to know, because in the 1990´s we Finns were still authentic. We wanted to work hard. Unemployment was difficult to bear. It was difficult to bear also because of the idea of Modern. Those who have grown up in the post-war world or before that remember that life was getting better and better all the time. Everything was progressing towards a golden future.

My friend writes in her doctoral thesis that the Modern was based on a story, a myth of progress. Every story contains a moral. The moral of the story of the Modern was that rational thinking, science and technology will take the mankind into a world of continous progress and increasing welfare attainable to all people. Unemployment was contradictory to the general theme of everything getting better. It was difficult to fit in into this meaning-making system and therefore unaesthetic and ugly. It was pushed into the margin as if did not exist. Anyhow people faced and experienced unemployment in their own life.

What did my friend find out in her study? She - and some other people before her - found out that the story of the Modern has become outdated. There are too many things in the margin. Besides unemployment we have there starving people, wars, refugees, refugee camps, environmental problems etc. Not all people´s life corresponds to the story of continuous progress and increasing welfare. And as members of a modern northern Protestant democracy we cannot just push aside these people. We need to do the opposite. First we need to listen to them and second we need to find out what we really have heard.

When people were telling about their life as unemployed persons, they were telling stories. There was a plot that their descriptions followed. Some of them were heroes in the battle between the good and the bad. These heroes were set in a public test, fighting an honourable fight and coming out of it as winners. In the end they found a job and the favourable life situation was restored. As heroes they received admiration from others.

For another group of people the unemployment was a tragedy. In a tragedy the protagonist is an innocent, respectable person. He goes on fighting bravely, but has no chances to win. He ends up in a psychological and practical cul-de-sac. We feel pitty for him.

Some people talked about their unemployment as if it were a comedy. In a comedy the protagonist gets into conflict with the society, but he has suppressed resources that he can harness and use when searching for alternative ways of earning the living. It is as if the doors behind had closed and the new doors had not yet opened. This between-the-doors experience may become true as a journey or an adventure. It is a carnevalistic period when the rules governing the normal life are no more valid. During this carnival new things take place and opportunities knock on the door. Besides dreams the protagonist has also weaknesses. Depending on what the he does in real life, the end result may be a criminal story as well as a comedy.

There were also people who questioned all of the above descriptions of unemployment. They saw nothing heroic, tragic or comical in their situation. Vilma Hänninen (ISBN: 951-44-4651-8) classifies this story form as irony.

In an irony the protagonist steps out of the model stories. This means that he ends up in the margin of the margin. His life is not following the umbrella story of the Modern, nor is it in accordance with the culturally shared stories of unemployment. This makes the life difficult, especially if there are debts to pay and family to take care of. It also shows that we really have certain models which we need to follow if we want to live normal life in the particular society we are surrounded by.

As I said before, meanings need to be grouped and chained, they need to be fitted into the plots that our culture offers us. In this way they become stories. The unemployed Finns that Vilma Hänninen interviewed never thought that they were telling this or that type of a story. They were just describing their own life situation. And for doing that, the surrounding culture offered them various alternative models. In the 1990´s the most familiar models were a hero-story and a comedy.

What Hänninen states in her thesis is that the unemployed would have it easier, if we had more alternative story models at our disposal. What we as Finnish society would need is more diversified models for living a good, decent life. However, the only way to get those models is to have people who live them true first. And for doing that you need to follow the hard-working Protestant ethics. You need to know the model stories and how to be a protagonist in good ones. You can be absolutely sure that the easiest and most comfortable way to live here is to work hard and be a hero.