The writer Llucia Ramis says she is “terrified” because even though she has been able to afford a mortgage for a flat, after years of renting from place to place, who knows if one day she won’t be able to pay the installments. We thank the writer and the interviewer, Laura Serra, for having helped to popularize this Mallorcan form of what in Catalonia would be being “terrified” and, at the same time, we regret that this opportunity to enrich vocabulary is born from the harsh reality of the real estate market. 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 malaise is already a vital constant of European society, and therefore also of Catalan society, with the specificity of our chronic national malaise. The demonstrations by 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 labor 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 twice or 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 selfish, 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.
