After Suecophilia
Goodbye Zara Larsson
I went to the local IKEA over the freeway on the first Friday of 2025 and into a gated community. If you’ve been to one IKEA you know the layout. The bus stop. The sliding doors. The free coffee offer for IKEA Family members. The escalator to the restaurant and the children’s area – just a video room, not Småland.
It was my first visit in almost a decade as a non-Swedophile. I entered the store with a weird feeling. No more pressure to feel lagom. I have no concern that it wouldn’t be as Swedish as my previous visit. No more expectation to feel, for the next hours, that I’d live my best hygge life (it’s Danish, yeah).
I picked the right time to get over my obsession with Sweden. The showrooms surely had IKEA goods and featured similar rooms you might live yourself in the West. But the Indonesian touch had been heavier now: The fictional families who ‘live’ in the fictional rooms are now portrayed as Sundanese Muslims and the women wear hijab in their photos. Even in the early 2020s, there were no photos or if I remember correctly, there were standard photos featuring European and East Asian faces (it’s called localization, Mario).
And yet I couldn’t complain about politics. The majority of female patrons around me wore hijabs. One can say that IKEA knew its consumers well. This is your new bedroom. This is your new coffee table. This is your fika moment.
Like in the West, a woman wearing a hijab is a Muslim, but no more than that. Their politics can range from the far left to the far right. They can like any country and culture in the world, with the obvious exception of Israel and Jewish. Indeed, instead of 2020, I wonder if the October 2023 politics have influenced both designers and consumers to embrace the hijab identity. For IKEA itself this had been a lifesaver since the Quran burnings of 2023 did prompt a call to boycott IKEA and other Swedish companies.
One ongoing theme of my post-pandemic life is how detached I am from Indonesia and Asia and how I’ve become attached to North America. Part of this transformation involves detaching myself from Europe, which I loved in the mid-2010s. It was a time when the United States was all about guns, excess, and shouting matches. It was a time when Europe was all about clean transport, feminism, and sustainable life.
I picked Sweden as my European holiday spot since it had affordable currency (akin to the Hong Kong dollar), I found it easier to learn the language than Dutch and Danish, and all the cool things associated with it. The pop bands from ABBA to the Cardigans, IKEA and H&M, and the women’s football team. My final two choices went down to Denmark and Sweden (Norway isn’t in the EU and Austria uses Euro, not to mention the difficult Viennese German) and IKEA and H&M defeated Lego and the unpronounceable Danish.
I went back from Sweden as a full-fledged Suecophile and wanted to migrate there. Sent some applications, connected with Swedes, and got into the culture. For a while, I thought that God expelled me from Australia so I could move to Sweden.
Again, 2023 decided all. Some European mutuals unfollowed first and I suppose it was caused by my pro-Israel or even pro-Jewish retweets. I found several Swedish celebrities to be ‘anti-zionist’. And yes, a couple of Europeans I knew had pro-Hamas messages on their timelines. Suddenly the Jewish American suspicion of Nordic aesthetic became understandable.
That’s how I ended my love for Sweden, although it didn’t flip into hate as I don’t need hate. I just didn’t think it was necessary to try oat milk and fake meat. I wasn’t devastated when IKEA didn’t have any lingonberry jars, and when it didn’t feature images of Swedish people enough. The catalog, which had lost its magic by the late 2010s anyway, had been gone, likely another budget cutting masqueraded as sustainability.
In fact, it’s very hard to have a Swedish mutual today. I have one or two holdovers from the 2010s (including a former ambassador) who are not very active on X. There’s maybe one who gets suspended or banned. There is another who although doesn’t hate Jews, unfortunately, hates another mutual, and I had to choose.
The good news is I am freed from want. The want of finding that good aesthetic, the want of liking people who don’t like me back, the want of moving to somewhere impossible. The reality is I’m trading stories and ideas with Americans instead of Swedes, and objectively it’s an upgrade.