The bad mood

The writer Llucia Ramis says she is “acollonada” because despite having been able to afford a mortgage for an apartment, after years of going from one rental to another, who knows if one day she won't be able to pay the installment. We thank the writer and the interviewer, Laura Serra, for having contributed to popularizing this Mallorcan way of being “acollonida” in Catalonia and, at the same time, we regret that this opportunity to enrich vocabulary arises from the harsh reality of real estate. Because if anyone wants to read a very well-explained summary of the great contemporary unease that affording a place to live has become, they should read the interview.

The bad mood is already a vital constant of European society, and therefore also of Catalan society, with the specificity of our chronic national malaise. The demonstrations of teachers these days, like those of doctors or farmers before, are also eloquent. Nobody is happy with anyone. Not even those who have a job. It has to do with purchasing power and savings capacity, with work demands, with inefficiency and administrative bureaucracy, with artificial intelligence perceived as an imminent labor threat, with the fact that very well-prepared people, who decades ago would have found work in Catalonia, are leaving the country, to places where salaries are two and three times better, with the evidence that taxes serve to resist, but not to improve, and on top of that you have to hear yourself called unsociable, as in the Andalusian campaign these days. And all seasoned with the background noise of political infighting that does not serve to produce well-being. The thinning of the middle class is a fact, and this is bad news for any country that wants to be cohesive. The mattress is getting thinner and thinner, and the floor is very hard.