Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard frames everyday life as a kind of ongoing “work” that keeps the fact of mortality at bay. The struggle, routines, and pressures of living function like a screen: they absorb attention and provide a narrative of purpose. When that friction is temporarily lifted—through comfort, leisure, sudden calm, or the suspension of ordinary demands—the repressed certainty of death can surface abruptly, not as a meaningful truth but as something opaque and destabilizing (“unintelligibly”). The quote fits Baudrillard’s broader interest in how modern life manages anxiety through systems of signs and activity, and how what is excluded (death) returns in uncanny, non-rational form.