By Alan AtKisson
At the age of forty, I moved to Sweden, and learned Swedish. Like any wealthy country, Sweden is full of shopping malls and the advertisements that drive us to them. Although once feared by US leaders as a bastion of socialism (President Dwight Eisenhower once gave a speech on the topic), this Nordic country has always been a tiny capitalist powerhouse, from Alfred Nobel’s string of European dynamite and gunpowder factories in the 1800s, to today’s global brands like IKEA or H&M. A visiting colleague from Tunisia, who had spent time in both the US and Sweden, reflected to me that Swedes seemed to him even more obsessed with shopping than Americans – which was saying quite a lot.
But despite the usual consumerist excesses that one can find here (mostly in the major cities), Sweden also has something that many other countries do not have: the concept of lagom.
The Sova Project 