Meursault says this near the end of The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, after a court has sentenced him to death. He is not being nihilistic. He is arriving at something clearer: a recognition that the elaborate distinctions we draw between kinds of death, between one Tuesday and another, between this career path and that one, rest on a shared foundation we prefer not to examine.

We spend our lives negotiating the “when” and the “how.” When to change jobs, how to retire comfortably, when to have children, how to avoid suffering. These are practical questions, and they deserve attention. But Camus is pointing to what sits beneath them: the assumption that getting the timing and the method right will somehow protect us from the fundamental condition all humans share.

It won’t. And admitting this is not despair. For Meursault, it is the beginning of a strange clarity. If when and how are stripped of their ultimate importance, then the pressure to live according to someone else’s schedule dissolves. You are no longer late. You are no longer behind. The calendar loses its tyranny. What remains is simpler and harder to name: the fact that you are here, today, and that this is the only certainty you were ever going to get. The question is not when or how you will live. It is whether you will notice that you already are.