Community has for decades been an intrinsic part of Maltese life. 

Be it the sense of community around something like a village feast, or a football team, or even something as simple of taking a walk to a small corner store, or simply sitting outside your doorstep on a fresh evening with a gentle breeze blowing through.

This leader writer came across such a scene in Xghajra a couple of weeks ago: a scene with families and friends sitting on benches on the promenade, elderly ladies pockmarked along various doorsteps, a gaggle of nuns in a circle on a bench and some foldable chairs.

Unfortunately, elsewhere in Malta and Gozo this is a village scene from a bygone era.

As development across the country accelerates, as our infrastructure deteriorates, and as our villages are turned into faceless and characterless towns – we lose our own sense of togetherness and community.

A part of this is how society has changed in the past years.  We as a collective have become more individualistic; more materialistic; arguably more selfish.  We seem to care more and more about ourselves rather than those around us.

That has led to an eroding sense of not just community, but also an eroding sense of self.

The Malta Independent last week reported the results of a survey, conducted by the Faculty of Social Wellbeing that revealed that 54.6% of people have a sense of loneliness, which is an 11.1% increase from the last survey the Faculty conducted in 2019.

The survey also revealed that 10.5% of respondents do not feel positive about their life. 20.8% of the respondents experience a general sense of emptiness. 9.6% of respondents revealed that they do not feel that there are many people they can lean on when they face problems.

Other mental health issues that the population is facing have been well documented: 79% of employees experience work-related mental health issues, for instance, while 5.3% of Maltese reported suffering from depression, while 7.9% said they suffered from chronic anxiety.

The factors are various, of course, but at the core of this is the country and society we have created – or allowed to be created – around us.

As sociologist Michael Briguglio told The Malta Independent on Sunday this weekend, our current infrastructure is claustrophobic, unsafe and uninviting. He emphasised the importance of having an infrastructure which is safe and accessible, to promote social interaction and prevent loneliness.

Yet what once were our community areas no longer inviting.  Green open spaces are few and far between, and even the ones that do exist are largely under-maintained and not appealing.  Our pavements – once a hotbed for social interaction – are broken, dirty, taken up by scooters, overshadowed by towering apartment blocks.

Our country needs more investment in its communities.  We’ve heard so much about investing in people, but that investment has invariably been meant in the economic sense: in people getting better job opportunities, being more financially stable, and so on.

There’s nothing wrong in that, of course, but money is not the be all and end all.  We need to invest in enriching our communities, into rebuilding them to what they once were – truly we need to invest into the self of each and every one of us.

Otherwise, we as a society will never recover.