In The Plague, the character Tarrou makes this confession late at night, speaking to Dr. Rieux on a rooftop overlooking a city under quarantine. He is not talking about germs. He is talking about the human condition itself: that destruction, decay, and indifference are the default settings of the universe, and everything we value exists only because someone chose to build it and keep building it.

This is the absurd laid bare in practical terms. We do not live in a world designed for our flourishing. Meaning is not waiting to be discovered like a buried treasure. Health, kindness, justice, connection: none of these arrive on their own. They are constructed daily, through effort, and they will collapse the moment we stop paying attention.

That sounds exhausting. But consider the alternative Tarrou identifies: pretending the microbe is not there. Pretending that goodness is automatic, that your relationships maintain themselves, that the world will simply cooperate with your plans. That pretense is comfortable, but it leads to a harder reckoning when reality reasserts itself.

There is a strange dignity in Tarrou’s vision. When you accept that nothing good is guaranteed, every good thing you sustain becomes an act of defiance. Your morning coffee with someone you love, your honest day of work, your refusal to look away from suffering: these are not passive habits. They are victories over the microbe, won through vigilance, repeated every single day.