"After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life"
About this Quote
Brodsky slips a blade between two modern pieties: that you can optimize your career and still be fully, authentically alive, and that “being real” is the highest virtue. The line starts like sober advice - life and work are both hard, mastery is rare - then swerves into a disarming permission slip: if you must counterfeit something, counterfeit the thing everyone romanticizes.
The subtext is not a Hallmark defense of workaholism. It’s a poet’s suspicion of performed sincerity. “Life” here isn’t breathing, eating, or loving; it’s the curated spectacle of having a life: the personality, the anecdotes, the “balance,” the carefully signaled depth. Brodsky is poking at the social demand to look fulfilled, socially fluent, emotionally available - and at the hypocrisy that often trails it. Faking work produces bad work and gets found out fast. Faking life can be rewarded: it oils conversation, protects privacy, keeps the world at a manageable distance.
Context matters. Brodsky was exiled, surveilled, tried for “social parasitism” in the Soviet Union - his very right to be a poet treated as a fraud. For someone whose labor was questioned by the state, the idea of faking work isn’t just immoral; it’s existentially dangerous. Better, he suggests, to keep your inner life illegible and let the craft be the honest part.
It’s also a provocation aimed at artists: stop treating your biography as your credential. Write well. Let “life” be the mask if it has to be. The work can bear the truth.
The subtext is not a Hallmark defense of workaholism. It’s a poet’s suspicion of performed sincerity. “Life” here isn’t breathing, eating, or loving; it’s the curated spectacle of having a life: the personality, the anecdotes, the “balance,” the carefully signaled depth. Brodsky is poking at the social demand to look fulfilled, socially fluent, emotionally available - and at the hypocrisy that often trails it. Faking work produces bad work and gets found out fast. Faking life can be rewarded: it oils conversation, protects privacy, keeps the world at a manageable distance.
Context matters. Brodsky was exiled, surveilled, tried for “social parasitism” in the Soviet Union - his very right to be a poet treated as a fraud. For someone whose labor was questioned by the state, the idea of faking work isn’t just immoral; it’s existentially dangerous. Better, he suggests, to keep your inner life illegible and let the craft be the honest part.
It’s also a provocation aimed at artists: stop treating your biography as your credential. Write well. Let “life” be the mask if it has to be. The work can bear the truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work-Life Balance |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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