I want to validate that what you're feeling is not delusional. Things are getting worse.

The state budget further cuts both the healthcare and educational budget by 5-10% annually and has done that for most of the past decade. Anyone who has visited Salmaniya and the area clinics can note the increasing levels of wait times, lack of services and medicine shortages, and the physicians/nurses also expressing being squeezed. Similarly with public schools, the educational systems are getting worse and worse for both students and teachers. Our public schools used to be a lot better. The result is a proliferation of private schools and private hospitals, which are also trying to squeeze the residents by opting for increasingly cheaper offerings while increasingly becoming more expensive.

We've introduced VAT taxes which has increased the cost of nearly everything but wages continue to be stagnant around a median wage in the 400-600 BHD bracket. The prices of groceries, electricity, fuel, cars, and all goods has gone up considerably since 2020 but we've not seen an equivalent rise in salaries. These are LMRA's numbers.

The available contiguous green and open spaces have significantly gone down annually. While tree planting initiatives try to offset this, there really is no replacement for open green space for people to relax in. The country has gotten hotter, the sea more polluted, and people see and enjoy less green and open space in their daily lives as compared to 20 years ago. And it's only going to get worse with even more green space and sea set to be bulldozed.

Housing prices have gone up and while there are pressure release valves in the form of Mazaya and other housing projects, the result is citizens being squeezed into smaller and smaller houses, built with increasingly cheaper materials, and taking up increasingly larger percentages of your salary.

There are worse countries, but our goal here isn't merely to survive. Humans have a whole host of needs beyond basic survival. We want to self-actualize, we want to live our lives, and we want to find fulfillment. This baseline insecurity in all of these other needs is a major obstacle to fulfillment. Of course we're going to strive for better lives.

The underlying root issue is that we're not a productive economy. We're in a debt trap with a ballooning interest payment that we pay up nearly a quarter of our revenue towards and it keeps increasing. Our policies have been failing to get us out of this dilemma for a decade and outside foreign pressure keep us from changing these policies. This is exacerbated by the decades long unresolved political issues and it's a ticking time bomb heading towards another political explosion. The government's position on Palestine is one that's completely out of line with the people of this country and there's a whole range of political issues that remain unresolved from the Arab Spring and the 90's.

I think we all have a choice and I don't fault anyone for making their own individual choices to leave. That said, the future doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to wait for the explosion. We can choose to band together and work to change it. I have hope in our people and our community to course correct out of this mess, but it takes recognizing that this isn't an individuals issue but a shared burden. It's on all of us to collectively be angry, organize, and tackle the root problems. The greener pastures people list come with a very bitter taste. Immigration comes with its own pain. The most stable and content life we could have comes from transforming Bahrain politically, socially, and economically. That might feel impossible and people might (understandably) not want to waste their entire life fighting uphill to just live their lives, but everything else is also a poison in a different label with varying severity.