Malta is 316 square kilometres of limestone, sea, and roughly four trees per postcode. I lived there for five years and loved it — right up until the year I caught myself calling a roundabout with a single olive tree 'a bit of nature.' That's not a lifestyle, that's a symptom. So I moved to Tallinn, a city that's something like forty percent forest, and started over.
01 What an island doesn't tell you it's taking
It's slow. Nobody arrives in Malta and immediately misses trees — the sea does a lot of covering for it, and for a good while it's a fair trade. I grew up in the Pyrenees, mountains starting more or less at the garden fence, so I'd assumed I was fairly nature-proof. Turns out I'd just been running on a five-year reserve tank without noticing the gauge.
What actually wears you down is smaller than 'no forests.' It's the same seven walking routes on repeat. Heat that keeps you indoors, behind AC, for half the year. A horizon that's always sea — beautiful, and also the same picture every single day. You don't clock it as a problem. You clock it as being a bit tired, a bit flat, and you assume that's just what work feels like now.
02 Choosing weather you can work in
Tallinn is objectively a worse deal on paper — colder, darker in winter, a fraction of Malta's light. I picked it anyway, on purpose, for the forest that starts about fifteen minutes from wherever I am. Now the reset between a bad call and the next one is an actual walk under actual trees, not a scroll past the same sea view.
The work changed with the scenery, which I didn't fully expect. Longer walks, slower mornings, more staring at moss than I'd ever admit in a client meeting — and somehow better output at the end of it. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think I'd just been quietly design-starved for a few years and mistook it for burnout.