Notes from Malta: On Belonging and the Great American Loneliness

After two days in Malta—a sun-bleached outcrop in the middle of the Mediterranean—I’ve come to a conclusion as plain as the local bread and as bitter as the espresso: I feel more welcome here among strangers than I do back home among my own tribe.

There is a peculiar kind of warmth here. Not the saccharine, scripted kind dispensed at American retail counters by people who know the boss is listening, but a natural, unstudied ease. The woman who hands me my pastizzi seems to actually want me to enjoy it. The teenager who helped me to decipher the bus schedule didn’t glance nervously to see if I’m armed. The greetings are not obligations; they are customs born of a society not yet fully atomized.

Compare this to the land of the free, where one is technically surrounded by fellow citizens, but feels adrift in a fog of mutual suspicion. Neighbors avoid eye contact, cities become mazes of self-checkout kiosks and privatized sadness, and human connection is relegated to app-based approximations. America, for all its swaggering wealth and rhetorical freedom, increasingly feels like a fortress of solitary confinement cells.

One begins to suspect that our condition is not just political or economic, but existential. We are estranged not just from each other, but from the very idea of a shared public life. We are ruled by what Mencken might call “the iron whimsy of individualism run amok.” Everyone is sovereign, everyone is a brand, everyone is an influencer, and everyone is alone.

In Malta, I am no one’s client. I am a guest. And that, perhaps, is the distinction that makes the ache of return so acute.

Let the technocrats automate connection. Let the demagogues offer tribal belonging with a heaping dish of bile. I’ll take instead the nod from the baker, the wave from the man on the scooter, the brief illusion—no, the real sensation—of being among people who still know how to be people