Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Dahlberg’s line is a grim little machine: it takes the familiar self-help reflex of “working on yourself” and flips it into an indictment of the whole project. The first sentence skewers a particular modern habit of mind - the endless audit of shortcomings, the obsessive self-scrutiny that masquerades as moral seriousness. He calls our supposed “virtues” imaginary not because goodness is fake, but because we often treat it like a brand story: something to curate and announce rather than practice. We spend so much energy narrating the self that we starve the self of change.

Then comes the sting: “we only perfect our vices.” The verb choice matters. Vices aren’t merely indulged; they’re refined, trained, optimized - a craft. That’s Dahlberg’s dark joke about human progress: our cleverness applies itself most efficiently to what corrupts us. Even repentance can become performance, another way to center the ego.

The final claim - that man dies worse than he was born - rejects sentimental ideas of moral evolution and pokes at the comforting belief that time automatically produces wisdom. Written by a novelist formed in the churn of the 20th century, Dahlberg’s pessimism reads like an anti-Whiggish response to “progress” culture: industrial modernity, political violence, and mass persuasion didn’t elevate character; they gave our appetites better tools.

Subtext: if you want improvement, stop fetishizing the diagnosis. Virtue isn’t an identity; it’s a discipline that loses to vice when we treat our flaws as fascinating and our ideals as decorative.