As an EU insider-turned-outsider, Brussels expat Petra Petan explores modern life, identity, and ambition in the European capital.
During my first months in Belgium, I visited a friend’s house somewhere in the Walloon countryside. After a bucolic afternoon walk along a forest stream, we set out to cook dinner: leek risotto as the main course.
As I diligently washed the stubborn dirt from between the layers of the leeks, just as my mother had taught me, my Belgian host remarked: “You don’t have to make so much effort, it’s just earth.” I realised immediately I was not in the same country anymore.
Soon thereafter, before starting my new job in the cabinet of a former European Commissioner, I had to provide a photo for my shiny new badge – the kind that doesn’t contain an expiration date, although I was no permanent official.
Does the work make the man?
I went to a photo studio over at Schuman to get my headshot. But the photos I received were so blurry that I returned minutes later to complain, wielding an older photograph taken back home in Slovenia as proof – crisp and focused, as it should be.
The photographer, however, was undeterred: “It doesn’t really matter, the quality of the photo, as anyway it will be scanned and reduced further for the badge.” I left, having run out of arguments.
But plenty ran through my mind. I was raised to believe that doing work, especially good work, was not just important – it was the point of this earthly life. You wake up in the morning to accomplish a day’s worth of tasks, impeccably.
Carpe diem, this quintessentially Latin convention, has a different meaning further East: seize the day by doing as much as you can, without leaving it to tomorrow. This is the mental spine of a nation of former peasants who, busy surviving successive empires, had no breathing room for idleness.
Eventually, cutting corners became a sign of deficient character. In my world, it doesn’t matter what the photograph will ultimately be used for: if you are a photographer, or any other professional, you are supposed to take pride in your work and do it well – not as a matter of convenience, but conviction.
As the Slovenian saying goes, it is the work that makes the man.
Marrying East and West
That same mentality is harder to find in Brussels. In things big and small – from the cleanliness of homes and public spaces to the quality of the built environment – there is often a sense that 'good enough' will do.
While my ancestors were still cultivating small plots of land at the edge of the Habsburg Empire, Belgium laid the first railway tracks in continental Europe, making it one of the world’s richest nations. As with all early achievers, though, precocious success can curdle into complacency.
Belgium’s extreme riches – coal, steel, and then the Congo – translated over the last two centuries into prosperity so widespread that, for most people, living well simply didn’t require extraordinary effort. Comfort, I suspect, is the opposite of perfectionism.
Add to that the later trappings of modern civilisation, such as Amazon Prime next-day delivery, and it makes sense that toil – creation, maintenance, repair – loses some of its urgency. As I am reminded daily, work here is not character-defining but adjacent to one’s identity: we can do things quickly, and then enjoy life. Or even the other way around.
It has taken me ages to accept this leisurely approach as a legitimate way of life. I still clash with its daily appearances all around me, not least in my own marriage – a marriage between East and West, between sweet jouissance and the imperative of discipline and order.
But instead of remaining outraged, I decided – as a good immigrant – to use the opportunity of integration to take the edges off the intergenerational trauma born of centuries of subjugation and scarcity in my part of Europe: perhaps something breaking is not the end of the world, and going the extra mile to achieve near-perfection is sometimes simply not worth the effort.
Still, one’s heritage runs deep, and I am holding on to the conviction that doing good work matters, for both our sense of self and society at large. I still scrub the leeks, still keep my apartment impeccable and shoe-free, and still rewrite my drafts endlessly.
It is, after all, by clinging to a work ethic that the downtrodden have always survived. And conversely, how many an empire that thought itself eternal has eventually crumbled – by renouncing the value of hard work.
