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Perhaps you have of late been watching swarms of Scottish football fans take over Boston and Miami with a world-class level of good-natured shenanigans, and wondering if this is typical Scottish behavior. And I am here to tell you, based on my experience, yeah, it is. I have been studying in Glasgow for almost a year now, and these people really do love clambering up on statues and putting traffic cones on them. They really do play the bagpipes and wear kilts, a lot, like a lot more than I’d expected. And while we are all individuals and cultural stereotypes are just cultural stereotypes, the vibe from Scotland I’ve found, from Day 1, has been pure joy.
Joy! When was the last time you paused and told yourself, “This is joy. What I’m experiencing, right now, is joy.”? I’m not talking about fun. I’m not talking about contentment. I’m talking about unfiltered, exuberant, toes-in-the-sand, silly, silly joy.
A few years ago, I wrote about the World Population Report’s “happiest countries in the world,” and what insights we miserable, 24th in show, Americans might glean from it. I had been at the time spending a few weeks in the Netherlands, home to some of the statistically happiest yet demonstrably most poker-faced individuals on the planet. And what I realized in my writing about places like The Netherlands, Costa Rica, and all the Scandinavian nations was that authentic happiness has a lot more to do with everyday, baseline security and quality of life than big Instagram moments.
If your metric for happiness is poppin’ bottles at the club like you’re Usher and it’s 2009, you may spend a lot of your life being disappointed. If it’s healthcare and walkable cities, you might not say YEAH! as often but you’ll probably tick more of the boxes for what makes a conventionally happy life. But this can be a hard concept to accept, because we Americans fucking lovvvvve anything we believe will be fun, and we wannnnnt to get our hands on said promised fun. And fun is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness can be pretty quiet. Boring, even. Like the feeling of having food on the table and neighbors you know.
And then there’s joy.
Joy is frequently loud. Scotland level, decibel record-breaking loud. And I don’t believe you need to be playing the bagpipes while going down a slide in Boston because your team is playing in the World Cup for the first time in three decades to experience it. Because Scotland feels pretty joyful pretty often.
That cone on the Duke of Wellington’s head is an emblem of pure Scottish subversive joy. Joy that says, “Don’t take it all so seriously.” Joy that questions authority. Joy that isn’t afraid to fall on its fanny in its execution.
The world — definitely including large swaths of my beloved NYC and definitely encompassing large swaths of social media — puts a lot of value into consumerist ideals of fun. We’re regularly encouraged to believe we can somehow buy fun with a new piece of clothing or a game (all while also cultivating a daily updated knowledge of upsetting world events to be conversant on). Scotland, meanwhile, is like, traffic cones as hats! Because joy is not buying things. Joy is experiencing things.
It’s easy to get in our heads and worry that everybody is going to be looking at us and judging us if God forbid we do something that might be authentically joy-inducing. But look at the Tartan Army — they acted like a bunch of chaos goblins for three weeks and the whole world fell in love with them.
I recognize that the image of football fans we’ve been seeing at the World Cup is overwhelmingly laddish and white, and the consequences for people who don’t fit that bill are harsher in the eyes of the world. But today, I would like to encourage you to be the chaos goblin you wish to see in the world. Because overall the people I’ve found in Scotland, of all stripes, are the the most fucking fun, hilarious individuals I’ve ever encountered anywhere. Not just my friends, either, but randos sitting next to me at that theater who share their candy and their life stories. Or this guy, and the guy playing for him.
Here are some things I think Scotland does very well, joy-wise, that we could take some cues from:
Music/Art/Creativity
The country’s largest city, Glasgow, is a UNESCO City of Music. You cannot escape music here. You WILL come upon a brass band doing its thing while you’re leaving the Oxfam bookshop, and you WILL hear a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’” featuring an enthusiastic “up and down the boooolyvard!” as you pass a pub at 5.30 in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, the joy of making music isn’t just for people trying to become TikTok famous. There are choruses and ukulele groups. And I promise every musical program will have something silly, cheeky, and crowd-pleasing that will somehow also give you chills. So even if it’s just in the privacy of your own kitchen, I beseech you to sing and dance as much as possible.
There are also murals everywhere, which means there is COLOR everywhere. Honestly fuck your streamlined beige bullshit.
Nature
The story goes that “Glasgow” means “dear green place,” and while it’s a little more etymologically complicated than that, the point stands. People can and do see cows in the park. I currently have a baby seagull on my windowsill (and a very loud, cranky mama). Argyle Street is as scuzzy as Brooklyn’s Jay Street or San Francisco’s Market Street, but loads of parks and the beautiful River Clyde mean that you can walk in any direction and see trees in minutes. We humans require nature.
And when you get outside of the cities, well, do I even need to tell you?
Not ruling out a little drinking
Okay, yes, the fact that Scottish fans basically drank Boston — BOSTON — dry feels like something that should earn its own trophy. And I cannot deny that there have been weekends here where I’ve seen girls gleefully staggering around in cowboy hats and understood that their euphoria was helped along by a sickening amount of Aperol spritzes. But I also know people here who don’t drink at all, and genuinely believe the main story is always the social factor — the way people really make the effort to hang out together, in the real world, doing things other than parallel doomscrolling.
Last week I went to the birthday party for a friend’s daughter, and the pub was filled with people from preschoolers to octogenarians, talking to each other, laughing, and swatting around balloons. The city’s motto here is “People make Glasgow” and it’s true. Joy.
Just remembering to be playful
I know that even for a place whose national animal is, somehow, the unicorn, Scotland is not some quirky manic pixie dream country. It is a leading center for law, renewable energy, and finance. No disrespect to the intellectual energy that this fine country brings to the function. This just also happens to be a place where any day the temperature is above that at which water freezes, it’s TAPS AFF. A country that will gladly lean into its reputation for being, as Anthony Bourdain once put it, “gutsy.” You can be smart and whimsical, it’s okay.
This is not a wealthy country. The weather is shit 85% of the time. It has the widest health disparities in Europe. I am in no way going to minimize the very real drug problems and crime problems. This is maybe not a nation of robust Scandinavian and Dutch-style cyclists, you know? I would have to be the most tone deaf tourist to paint you a fairytale image of the place. An evening visit to any Tesco will disabuse you of that, as will the inevitable lad weaving towards you on the street with a bleeding face, a surprisingly regular sight!
And yet, there is an irrepressibly, beautifully lighthearted quality to life here that is palpable. That’s the thing, I think, about joy. It’s all those life-affirming glimmers within the darkness. It’s messy and imperfect. It’s boisterously singing in unison, “Nobody’s saying we’re gonna win it,” and having one hell of a time anyway. Because joy, as that Tartan Army have proven this month, isn’t entirely contingent on winning.
Shit is reliably always going to go sideways. The bus is going to be 20 minutes late. You can bitch about it or you and your friends can pass the time singing. Always choose singing. That’s what Scotland has taught me. It won’t make the wait any shorter. It’ll do something else. It’ll make it joyful.
Bravo Mary. I've lived in Scotland for 46 years. My wife has been here for 35 years. We're both American. And we're both so proud of the joy that the Tartan Army has brought to America, at precisely the time when Americans need it most. Many years ago, Esther Rantzen on That's Life, used to do a weekly thing where her team would start singing spontaneously on public transport. Each week was a different city. In most cities the reaction was uncomfortable embarrassment. In Glasgow, the people on the bus joined in within five seconds. Case closed.
Boston LOVED having the Tartan Army here (and all the other international visitors). They put traffic cones on all the ducks in the Make Way for Duckings statues in the Public Garden- nothing was safe!