Kafka's 1915 warning about your job
You slept last night, a young man in Prague
You wake up
You’re a bug
The clock reads 6:30 AM, and your body is different
You’re a bug
But your first thought is that you’ll miss the train for work! You’re an up-and-coming salesman, no doubt!
You’re still a bug!
You plan out your excuses; you’ll call out sick!
But you haven’t called out sick in 5 years! And your suspicious director will just call the company doctor, and he’ll visit you and deem you perfectly healthy! The director will lambast you, and your family who relies on you will be shamed!
dude, you’re a freaking bug!
There’s a knock at the door…
It’s your mother who is confused; shouldn’t you have left?
You reply, “All right, thank you, Mother…”
No, that wasn’t right; your voice is squeaky and weird. You fool yourself into thinking you can still work. You can’t even rock out of bed with your rounded back.
There’s another person at the door; it’s the chief clerk from work.
Maybe you weren’t so delusional, what the heck? He starts shaming you through the door and demands you open up and explain yourself.
Your poor sister begins sobbing.
You rock out of bed and fall on the floor. Try to hoist yourself up upright, but it’s impossible.
The chief clerk has had enough and decides to twist the knife.
He reminds you how the director was concerned; he just entrusted you to collect payments, but he had your back and came here to prove you’re capable, but now he sees you’re just wasting his time.
This triggers you.
You go on a bootlicking word-vomit soliloquy about how you’re about to let him in, and you’re feeling well, and please don’t tell the director, you’ll catch the next train and everything will be all right.
“Did you understand a single word of that?” asks the clerk.
It’s over; they know you’re a bug. But do you know?
Horror, Existentialism, Monsters as metaphors - oh Joy!
Mr. Kafka, your absurdism is showing.
In Kafka’s 1915 classic novella, Metamorphosis, you navigate a story about turning into a bug, one of the classic stages of young adulthood everyone suddenly wakes up to.
One moment, you’re human; the next day you’re that bug boy, who really likes holding tarantulas to show they’re not harmful.
Sorry, Timmy, I am not holding that no matter how much you tempt me your veggie sticks.
Of course, this bug has been famously depicted as a large cockroach, but Kafka never names a type of bug! It’s all through the gross details, like Gregor, the protagonist turned bug, who leaves slimy residue wherever he crawls, or how he can crawl on walls (and grows to like it!), or how he couldn’t get off the bed because of his round back!
You may not want to consider what your life would be like if you were turned into a cockroach and alienated by your family as a vermin, not calling you by your name, and leaving your room slowly turn into a maze of dirt and junk as you become part of that forgotten junk.
Some might call it existentialism, others, just horror.
It’s October, and I wanted to read more spooky classics, and this was a good choice.
I’ve always loved horror; it’s one of the primal ways to get my attention. Something spooky out there is going to get you and end your life. How is that not tantalizing? But some might not consider this horror, so while I was reading Save the Cat! Writes Horror by Jamie Nash, I was pleased with this scriptwriter’s definition of horror: If you think it’s horror, it’s horror.
He also notes that at their core, horror stories are about survival, whether survival of identity, free will, or physical life.
Nash also clarifies that monsters ultimately represent things we are fearful of like: death, the dark, parenthood, and loneliness.
So what is the metaphor for the horror that has overtaken our protagonist, Gregor?
Surprisingly, grief.
It’s the grief of all the lost dreams and aspirations the family had with Gregor. He was the volunteer sole breadwinner, and was holding up the family in a large apartment of his choosing.
He liked this control and wanted the praise for announcing he was putting his little sis through the Conservatory on Christmas, but never got the chance to.
And that’s all he thinks about as a cockroach; Gregor thinks about his sister and parents and how they’re changing month after month without him as if he were a ghost.
That’s the horror, watching your family move on. Having all your beliefs dispelled before you. Gregor finds out that not only are his family okay without him, they’d make due and find jobs to support themselves, but they also grow to resent his lingering presence in the house. They’re quiet, eat less, and have to sublease their apartment to snobby tenants.
The family despairs from the other end: a mom loses her child, a sister her brother, and the overbearing dad loses his retirement and has to get back to work.
This book was honestly hard to get through; it was funny because of how real some scenes got, but as any existential reader feels, the world is a bit uncaring, and there’s an overbearing sense of isolation, not only with Gregor locked up in his room, but the family silent in the dining room together, whispering, always aware that the monster, maybe Gregor, is in the house looming.
The book goes on to run through all 5 stages of grief.
As I noticed it, and looked it up, I couldn’t help but recognize that there is the same grieving in the world regarding jobs.
It’s your turn to grieve AI
Here’s something I didn’t know until I looked up the creator of the 5 Stages of Grief, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, she wrote the 5 stages in 1969 for the dying, not the people left behind. Only later did everyone apply it to the people wearing black at the funeral home.
Metamorphosis runs both at once: Gregor is dying, the family is in the funeral home, and the funeral home is just their home.
That’s where we are with AI and jobs. The big shake-ups are here, preemptively with layoffs or quietly with slow hiring, and the landscape changes as AI gains skills in more and more professions. Some of us are Gregor, the ones whose identity is the job. Most of us are the family.
Stage 1: Denial
What you watched at the top of this video was denial. Gregor’s a bug, and he’s worried about the 6:30 train. I know that feeling. I got early access to ChatGPT at Shopify in 2022, and back then the model was just a junior who could barely code; sometimes it autocompleted something decent. “It’s a toy” was my version of the train to catch, and it was true… at the time, which is what made it such a great excuse.
Stage 2: Anger
Gregor’s father drives him back into his room with a cane and later pelts with apples. One lodges in his back and rots there for the rest of the book.
The AI version is aimed at whoever says the quiet part out loud. DHH, an influential person in programming, recently said coding by hand is no longer an economically viable skill, and a chunk of the industry is throwing apples from their keyboards at him. Gregor’s dad was angry that Gregor’s new existence was a fact. He’s right. That’s usually what apples are for.
Stage 3: Bargaining
Gregor’s mother didn’t want anyone to move the furniture out of his room. If the room stays the same, maybe he’ll turn back to himself.
Companies bargain too. As I write this, Microsoft is offering a “Voluntary Exit Offer” to about 60,000 employees, about 27% of its global workforce, and they admit it’s for the AI efficiency push. The offer is generous: a week of base pay per six months of service, up to 39 weeks, plus two months’ severance. A product manager making ~160k with four years in walks with around $50k in taxable cash.
Some call it a double-edged sword. Jump off the Flying Dutchman with a life raft, or get push off with plywood in a few months.
Would you take it? If I worked at Microsoft, I would: a month off, maybe some travel, then interview prep, but then again that’s 60,000 former coworkers also competing for the same jobs.
Tell me in the comments what you’d do with the time and money.
Stage 4: Depression
Gregor stops eating. His room fills with junk and he becomes part of the junk. Nobody says his name; they even hire a charwoman just to deal with him.
It’s hard; AI is coming for other professions faster than expected. The math community is in shambles, going through the same stages we did as software engineers three years ago.
Terence Tao, whom a peer mathematician called “the Mozart of Maths,” grieved the recent OpenAI announcement of AI solving the Navier-Stokes problem, a Millennium Problem, denoting the end of Math 1.0 and how math 2.0 now requires a data center for any mathematical progress.
I think it’ll be harder to go through the stages of grief for anyone whose identity is wrapped up in the profession like Tao.
Tao is Gregor. I am not a Mozart of anything, so I was able to go through the stages much more smoothly.
Stage 5: Acceptance
Grete finally says it: “It has to go.” Gregor hears it, and gives his final breath back in his room. The next morning the family does something they haven’t done in months. They each write a note calling out of work, take a tram to the edge of the city, and bask in the sun. Nobody talks about him. For the first time, there’s a sense of optimism. That’s the real ending of the book, and it’s almost sweet: grief ends not with a new job, but with air.
I got to acceptance with AI and programming about a year ago, and that’s not bragging; I had a head start. The models got better, and I had to accept that this is the future of building with code as a profession. Some are still clinging to the old identity as coders.
I get it. Nobody chose the bug. It woke up in Gregor’s bed one morning, and the whole family had to deal with it, and that’s what AI is: not the thing that happened to Gregor, the thing that happened to everyone in the house.
Everybody chose what came after. The ones who got air were the ones willing to face it and move on, in their own way.
Face the bug
So. You woke up this morning, and something in the house was different.
You can spend the day ruminating about how maybe you can still catch that train, or you can sit at the table with the people who already have, and decide.”
The thing in the next room isn’t leaving. Kafka never tells us what kind of bug it was.
He didn’t have to.
For this family, grief took months.
Take as long as you need.
The sun’s already out. The tram leaves every morning.
I know you’ll catch it.
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