"Every decision you make is a mistake"
About this Quote
Dahlberg’s line lands like a dare: if you’re alive, you’re already guilty. “Every decision you make is a mistake” isn’t a fortune-cookie fatalism so much as a novelist’s scorched-earth critique of willpower itself. It weaponizes the totalizing “every,” refusing the comfort of exceptions. The blunt syntax gives it the air of a verdict, not an observation, and that’s the point: it pressures the reader to feel the weight of agency as a kind of trap.
The intent is less to deny choice than to expose how choice manufactures regret. Decisions don’t simply select outcomes; they amputate alternatives. Dahlberg, steeped in the 20th century’s disillusionment, treats the self as an unreliable narrator of its own motives. You choose, then immediately begin rewriting the story of why you chose; the “mistake” is the fantasy that the mind can calculate life cleanly. His pessimism is craft-conscious: the novelist knows that meaning is produced by consequence, not intention, and consequence always arrives with collateral damage.
Subtextually, the quote is also an insult aimed at modern confidence - the managerial belief that better information and better technique yield better lives. Dahlberg implies the opposite: the more deliberate you are, the more you’ll recognize your complicity in error. It’s a line that flatters no one, least of all the speaker, which gives it its acidic credibility. If every decision is a mistake, the only honest posture is humility - or, in Dahlberg’s register, a kind of combative clarity.
The intent is less to deny choice than to expose how choice manufactures regret. Decisions don’t simply select outcomes; they amputate alternatives. Dahlberg, steeped in the 20th century’s disillusionment, treats the self as an unreliable narrator of its own motives. You choose, then immediately begin rewriting the story of why you chose; the “mistake” is the fantasy that the mind can calculate life cleanly. His pessimism is craft-conscious: the novelist knows that meaning is produced by consequence, not intention, and consequence always arrives with collateral damage.
Subtextually, the quote is also an insult aimed at modern confidence - the managerial belief that better information and better technique yield better lives. Dahlberg implies the opposite: the more deliberate you are, the more you’ll recognize your complicity in error. It’s a line that flatters no one, least of all the speaker, which gives it its acidic credibility. If every decision is a mistake, the only honest posture is humility - or, in Dahlberg’s register, a kind of combative clarity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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