Lately, I’ve been travelling around a bit more. Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia. And increasingly, I get the feeling that there’s something wrong with us Slovenians. Not with our country, which is wonderful, but with us. With the way we treat others, with our intolerance and with the anger we apparently carry around with us all the time. It starts on the roads. Honking has become completely routine. If someone takes a second too long to pull away at the lights, they’re treated to a concert of horns. If they drive within the speed limit, they’re clearly an obstacle to everyone else. Then you go into a shop and are met by gloomy faces. People no longer say hello and, above all, I get the sense that they smile less and less. As if we’re all permanently angry at someone or something.
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Then you cross the border. In Italy, the squares are full of people in the evening, socialising, laughing and enjoying life. I notice a rather different atmosphere in Austria and Hungary too, even though those two countries were once considered rather “gloomy”. People seem more relaxed and friendlier.
Of course, this is entirely subjective, and perhaps as a visitor I only see the nicer side of their everyday lives. Even so, I get the feeling that people there haven’t forgotten that life can be good too.
Interestingly, the data doesn’t back up this feeling of mine. According to the World Happiness Report 2026, Slovenia ranks 18th in the world for life satisfaction. Ahead of Austria, Italy and Hungary. So, on paper, Slovenians are happier than our neighbours. But evidently there’s a difference between being satisfied with your life and showing that satisfaction to other people.
I feel we’ve become a nation of frustrations. Politics deserves a large share of the credit for that too, having systematically divided us into us and them for years. Instead of looking for solutions, it creates enemies. Instead of bringing people together, it drives them apart. Some politicians are perfectly happy with this state of affairs, because it’s much easier to convince an angry and frightened person that someone else is to blame for all their problems.
The media also plays its part, turning every news story into a catastrophe. Every day brings fresh scandals, new threats, new reasons for fear and anger. Add social media, where the loudest and most offensive voices get the most attention, and it’s hardly surprising that all this affects our everyday relationships too. Of course, politics and the media aren’t to blame for everything. We are also responsible for how we treat others.
That’s what worries me most. That we’ve allowed politics to get under our skin to the point where we can no longer have a normal conversation. That we judge people by their political allegiance, see every differing opinion as an attack, and take our anger out on complete strangers who have absolutely nothing to do with our problems.
Slovenia is a wonderful country and, objectively, we’re doing considerably better than we often admit. But what good is any of that if we’re becoming a society with fewer and fewer smiles, less kindness and less mutual respect? Perhaps we really do need a thorough reset of politics and, above all, the toxic atmosphere it creates every day.
If we carry on in this direction, nothing good awaits us. Not because we’ll go bankrupt or because Slovenia is a bad country, but because we’ll slowly forget how to live with one another. Perhaps Slovenia’s greatest paradox is that we live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, yet increasingly behave as though we’re being punished for it. Or perhaps politics is punishing us because Slovenians aren’t allowed to be happy and content. Above all, relaxed. There always has to be an “enemy”! Because only a frightened nation is a good nation for a certain half of politics.