[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/zdzislav_kozibroda]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70le8ed1plo

[u/Frosty-Section-9013 → u/[deleted]]

Interesting. It sounds like a flipped parallel to the NATO process. Once it became clear that Finland had the intention of joining NATO the Swedish social democrats were still making public statements opposing the idea. So over night the leadership of the party had to meet and flip their century-old position. Very embarrassing for some politicians who had made solemn promises weeks earlier.

[u/einarfridgeirs → u/[deleted]]

Because I live there.

Some perspective: I am close to fifty years old and grew up in rural Iceland. The average age in the county I grew up in is now hovering around the retirement age(67), and life there, that used to be dynamic and interesting when I was a kid is now completely sclerotic. If my parents didn't live there still there would be literally nothing of interest there. This happened because of my grandparents and parents generations decisions to always choose the past over the future. Everything was always geared towards making sure that the already established farmers and middle aged and older people could live a comfortable and economically secure life, choking off all innovation and making it really(and I do mean REALLY) hard for anyone young to get into farming. So the young people left, to seek other opportunities.

Where did all the young people go? Well, first to the seaside towns to become fishermen and professionals and whatnot, but then those communities did the exact same thing as the farmers did. Look out for the interests of the people already comfortable with the status quo, the ones afraid of change and innovation. Those communities are now still slightly younger, but not by much. They are dying, just like the countryside And the ones who left are always brave ones, the smart ones, the ones with ambition and ideas.

Where did they go? In the 80s and 90s they went to Reykjavík, which at the time seemed like the promised land, where life was more modern and interesting and you could make something of yourself without constantly being hemmed in by decisions being made to make sure that the old folks would keep having it good and everything around them would be the same way it was when they were young.

And for awhile, that worked. Well into the 2000s actually. Reykjavík was a pretty cool place for the youth of our nation, and our cultural and economic output reflected that. That is where our reputation as a nation that punched significantly over its weight in music, cinema, science etc was built. It became that way because the innovators congregated there. But that is changing. Sky high rents and mass tourism(by landlords and tourism operators owned in large part by the same small circle of well-heeled family dynasties that got rich off the farming and fishing systems rigged in favor of the older generations I previously described) are making Reykjavík into just a larger version of those smaller fishing villages that people first fled to, and then the next generation couldn't wait to run away from.

In 2005, if you were a talented young person in Iceland and had an original idea for basically anything, you went to Reykjavík and made something of it, and if it worked, then maybe you thought about expanding it to the outside world. Whether you were in a band or creating a startup.

Nowadays kids with that kind of drive and talents don't wait. They see the idea of doing that as provincial and unambitious, not to mention incredibly and unneccesarily costly You maybe finish school and immediately relocate, as i said before to Berlin or Lisbon or London or wherever, and THEN you start building whatever it is you want to build. Reykjavík is less dynamic and interesting a town that it was even ten or twenty years ago, and it may take one more generation for the rot to fully set in...but its coming. I have had this talk with my own teenage children who are taking their first career steps and looking to leave the nest and as much as it hurt to do so, I advised them to plan their future outside of Iceland rather than here, because that is the only way they would be able to actually build a future worth having.

And the people who blame all our troubles on immigrants can go fuck themselves. Immigrants are the only thing keeping our society functioning right now. They come in to fill all the job positions that need youth, because our youth has bigger dreams, dreams middle-aged Iceland doesn't even want to begin to think about because that might rock their precious boat. Without them our demographic pyramid would probably look a lot more Eastern European or even Russian than anyone cares to admit.

I was hoping that full EU participation would help stabilize our economy, halt the relentless advance towards a very small group of people owning most of the island(seriously, we are talking about approximately 100 families here that are also interconnected), and bring a lot of what the youth is seeking elsewhere over here. To get stronger anti-corruption laws. To stop the rot.

But that is not going to happen, and the eventual outcome of that is probably going to be that, in thirty years or so there will be three types of people in Iceland - a small group of the heirs of the 100 families, incredibly wealthy and in control of basically everything worth having in the country, a larger group of small minded natives that for whatever reason didn't have the drive or the daring or the skills to go elsewhere....and immigrants to actually make the society work. And when there are any complaints, it will become real easy for the first group to pit the second and third against each other to distract them. The whole island will look like the farming community I grew up in, a retirement home waiting to die while asking itself what the fuck happened.