Obviously I’m familiar with the concept of the sauna, because I’ve been to Iceland, where most socialising seems to entail either being unbearably cold or way too hot, but never until 2026 have I been required to engage with it at the coal face, which is to say, go to one. I thought that if anyone went, it was because they had a medical condition. This turns out not to be true, and suddenly saunas are huge. One friend has a sauna club. Another friend has opened a sauna. Even though I’m still nowhere near understanding the point, I went along because what else could I do? I’m a joiner.
These are the rules: even though you’re sitting really close to people, motionless, with nothing to look at or read or do, nothing standing between you and your own thoughts, you are still not allowed to interrogate others about why they’re there or even the basics – how they know each other, if they’re in love, whether they had a nice day.
So I couldn’t talk to strangers and just had to observe all this with my own eyes and ears: I think people are pretty serious about wanting to see each other without having to get drunk. It’s been a pretty slow evolution, from a shy flirtation with socialising on zero-alcohol lager, through meeting for coffee instead, the ubiquitous Covid walking-meet, to this logical endpoint – let’s get together in a place where you cannot drink alcohol, otherwise you will faint.
On the flip side, the age-old conflation of self-care and self-improvement is at an end. Put simply, nobody goes to a sauna to lose weight or improve their muscle-to-brown-fat ratio, and if it does anything for inflammation, that’s a side-effect. It just makes you feel zen, and that’s enough.
No way am I committed to this new, wiser way of life. I just pause to observe that those who are seem to be on to something.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
