The cost of pretence

How often are we tempted to put on a good show, tell a made-up story, sell an illusion?

A Potemkin Village is something built or staged to give a false impression of prosperity, success, or good order. It’s a facade that hides a less flattering reality.

The term comes from a story that’s probably exaggerated. Grigory Potemkin was a Russian minister and rumoured lover of Catherine the Great. In 1787 Catherine toured newly conquered Crimea, and Potemkin is said to have set up fake, portable villages along her route—painted facades, well-dressed peasants—so she would believe the region was thriving.

The phrase stuck. Potemkin Village is now shorthand for any showy deception—corporate, political, or personal—meant to distract from underlying problems and harsher realities.

In 1998, the ill-fated Enron Corporation was launching a new division, but things weren’t quite ready. So they gutted a floor, decked it out with flashy chairs, big‑screen TVs, and phones, and rehearsed hard for a visit from Wall Street analysts. The leaders even reportedly ran the drill themselves, coaching staff on when and where to appear busy. The whole setup was designed to give analysts the illusion of a thriving operation. One former executive dubbed it “Enron’s Potemkin Village.”

That was merely a prelude. In the end, Enron turned out to be all about smoke swirling around mirrors, and became one of the greatest collapses in business history.

Many companies still persist with these stage-managed illusions. Dashboards show only the upticking metrics; the others stay off the screen. Innovation labs are used for VIP tours, not for any actual innovation. CSR and ESG are often just staff in branded t-shirts planting trees for a day—mere event photography that leaves the company free to undo the environment in their core operations. Customer-service mirages—short-lived blitzes of gifts and smiles—abound, but revert to the usual chronic neglect immediately after. Diversity is done for the optics in corporate videos and annual reports, masking deep-seated prejudice in everyday operations.

The camera points where directed; the mess stays just out of sight.

Individuals, too, can put up shimmering fronts. Social media seems to be a constant stream of beach sunsets, wine glasses clinking, joyful children, career wins. Darker days, emptiness, fights—they exist, but never make it into the frame.

LinkedIn posts are notoriously choreographed to sound like a string of triumphs and advancements. Self-doubt, recurrent anxiety, missed targets, sleepless nights—no need for those truths on that professional platform, folks.

Wealth is often on show, with dream homes and luxury motors disguising maxed-out credit cards, choking mortgages, and often with friends and family quietly footing the fallout.

We stage all these broadcasts for peers, followers, rivals, investors, even family. Here’s the thing: they can deceive even those behind them. Keep the facade polished enough, and you may yourself stop seeing the cracks it was meant to cover.

And then it collapses, and all is revealed.

We are all susceptible to Potemkin behaviour, and we should all be wary. A false front isn’t always built out of malice. Sometimes it’s survival. We present our best faces because the world is quick to judge, quick to pounce. We tidy the mess behind the curtain because mess is risky to reveal. Yet every Potemkin Village we maintain costs us: the exhaustion of upkeep, the distance from truth, the hollowness of applause that isn’t meant for who we really are.

The danger is not just that others are fooled—it’s that we become spectators to our own performance. The image starts to take precedence over the life. We confuse being seen with being known, being envied with being loved.

We have to live a life, not exist in a pretend one. Illusions drain energy and deepen isolation. What, then, should we do? Not abandon presentation altogether—life requires some polish, some theatre. But we should learn to keep the balance honest: share wins, yes, but also admit struggles; cultivate pride, but resist exaggeration; be wary of investing more in how things look than in how they are.

The deeper shift is to realise that connection doesn’t come from perfection. The cracked voice, the imperfect work, the unguarded admission—those are the moments that draw others closer and keep us grounded in reality.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

A sturdy life is one where the stage props can fall away, and the structure still stands.

 

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