Time & Perspective Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s line lands like a scolding delivered with a straight face: if you can’t manage your own health, the polite thing is to disappear quickly. The brutality is the point. It’s not a policy proposal so much as a moral grenade lobbed into the parlor, exposing how easily “common sense” can be weaponized into social cruelty.

The intent is to satirize a certain bourgeois fantasy of tidy responsibility, where illness is treated less as fate or biology than as personal failure. “Decency” is the knife twist: a word associated with manners and social order repurposed to justify erasure. The command to “get themselves buried” collapses care into inconvenience. It’s a portrait of a culture that confuses discipline with virtue and then pretends that neglect is merely efficiency.

Subtextually, Ibsen is needling the era’s faith in self-help moralism and the Protestant work ethic’s harsher cousin: the belief that worth is proven by productivity, and that the sick are, by definition, unproductive. That’s why “waste time about it” matters. The speaker treats time as society’s property, and the ill as thieves of it. It’s the logic of social Darwinism in drawing-room diction.

Contextually, Ibsen wrote during a period when industrial modernity was reorganizing life around output, respectability, and “usefulness,” while medicine and public health were uneven and class-bound. The line reads like an indictment of that moral accounting system: if you follow it to its end, you don’t get health. You get a polite death sentence.