How to Destroy Paradise... One Apartment at a Time

 It is getting worse. Spend five minutes in any large Facebook group, and you'll witness what can only be described as a national therapy session, except nobody's getting therapy.

Somewhere along the way, we collectively sold our souls. Not for eternal glory. Not even for a Ferrari. For another rental apartment and the hope of squeezing one more tenant into what used to be someone's spare bedroom.

The new national dream isn't to build a life. It's to knock down your grandparents' house, replace it with twelve identical grey boxes, and call it "investment."

PL didn't invent greed, but he certainly turned it into Malta's favourite spectator sport. Everyone suddenly became a property developer. If you owned a patch of land bigger than a bath towel, congratulations—you were now a tycoon.

For a while, it looked brilliant. Money was flowing, cranes were multiplying faster than rabbits, and GDP graphs pointed heroically upwards.

But here's the problem with a gold rush. Eventually... you run out of gold.

Now everyone is desperately building on every remaining square metre, convinced that if they can just fit one more apartment between two existing apartments, the miracle will continue. It's starting to feel less like economic growth and more like a family game of Jenga played by people who've had six beers.

Meanwhile, what did we actually gain?

Both parents work all day just to keep up with the mortgage on an apartment where you can hear your neighbour sneeze three floors away.

Children know their childcare workers better than their parents.

Sunday family outings have been replaced by circling shopping-centre car parks looking for a parking space that's apparently been declared a protected archaeological site.

The roads are permanently under construction. I honestly can't remember the last time I drove somewhere without orange cones, diversions, and a man in a fluorescent vest staring thoughtfully into a hole.

Construction has become Malta's national bird.

Finding a Maltese waiter has become like spotting the Blue Rock Thrush. You get excited because it's so rare.

Green spaces? Those are now artist impressions on planning applications.

Traffic? Everywhere.

Noise? Constant.

Air quality? Let's just say your lungs probably qualify as medium-rare after your morning commute.

Property prices have reached the point where estate agents proudly advertise a "cosy one-bedroom apartment," which is estate-agent language for "you can cook pasta without leaving the bed."

And through all of this, everyone keeps saying we're richer.

Really?

Because everyone looks exhausted.

This isn't the Mediterranean lifestyle many of us grew up with. It feels more like living in a crowded metropolis—except without the decent public transport, the big parks, or the ability to escape into the countryside for an hour.

Old Malta wasn't perfect, far from it. But it had something that's becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Space.

Time.

And the feeling that life wasn't one endless race to earn just enough money to pay for the privilege of living in a place that's slowly forgetting why people fell in love with it in the first place.