Plague

“What is this plague, this germ which, like the tubercle bacillus, lurks within, waiting for the victim’s strength to sink below a certain level so that it may strike?
It is not a new organism. Its ravages were predicted by certain seers of the nineteenth century.
Melville and Hawthorne, Nietzsche and Marx, Dostoyevsky and Kafka all saw it coming in one form or another.
Its actual appearances have been described in some detail by contemporary poets and painters, playwrights and novelists.
There were and are a few theologians at work on the bacterium, but for the most part of examination and analysis are taking place in the secular laboratories.
The germ has a very simple name: meaninglessness.
And the conditions under which is strikes are well known: when one raises or is confronted by the ultimate questions about live, about the purpose and meaning of existence, and discovers that there are no answers; no answers, that is, that can be believed.
Life seems pointless and empty, rather cruel and even a little mad.”

William Graham Cole. The Restless Quest of Modern Man