Reclaiming Friction: Kafka’s Playbook for Surviving Modern World [Recs]

Why you should read: Franz Kafka

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“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

Fun personal update- This will be the first article published from my new apartment. Moving apartments in NYC is a pain like few others, but (hopefully) it’s all done. I don’t understand why everything in this damn city is so complicated, but my apartment is NICE, so I’m not going to keep being a hater. How is your May opening up?

The world has turned ease into a product. Connection is instant, data endless, communication almost friction-free- yet loneliness is spiking. Our bodies rot in comfort while high-quality health advice floods every feed. Technology boosts individual leverage, but hopelessness and cynicism about changing the world are becoming the prominent aesthetic. This isn’t a glitch; it’s the business plan.

Critics hate on the newest app or societal trend, but this misses the deeper rule: we reward whatever removes friction and captures attention, even if it hollows us out.

Well-known cockroach enthusiast Franz Kafka spotted the mechanism a century early. His stories show how systems turn people into case numbers and choice into ritual. His special vibe of “sed boi crushed by a world that he can’t really understand” holds special relevance for revealing how alienation is baked into modernity. As we increasingly find ourselves cogs within machinery we barely see, Kafka becomes less of a recommendation, and more of a guide to survival.

Executive Highlights (TL;DR of the Article)

“All language is but a poor translation”

The article will cover the following in more detail-

• The Convenience Trap: Our relentless pursuit of frictionless ease hasn’t brought utopia; it’s bred widespread, hidden alienation. Many people blame digital platforms for this, but imo the widespread impact of the platforms is a symptom of a deeper problem where we choose the “safer” option of a superficial connection over a deeper (but riskier) engagement with the world around us. This gradually results in us becoming passive observers rather than active participants in life.

• Outsourced Power: This cultivated passivity allows agency to be quietly transferred to opaque, indifferent systems (algorithms, bureaucracies). These “invisible hands” manage our lives, optimizing for efficiency and control while abstracting away human cost and accountability. Eventually, we become cogs in systems we don’t control, with every facet of our existence sub-servient to its “objective function”.

Why you’re burt out

• Internal Fragmentation: Living under these systems corrodes the self. Attention fractures, critical thought erodes, and performative personas replace authenticity. This internal splintering is a huge problem since it makes us much more pliable for totalitarianism and control.

• Resistance Through Seeing: Kafka provides the critical lens to see this machinery clearly. Real resistance isn’t revolution, but reclaiming agency through deliberate acts: choosing necessary friction, rejecting the system’s validation, persisting in inquiry, and building meaning outside the machine’s logic. There is no permanent victory, but that doesn’t invalidate the importance of the battle.

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Section 2: The Convenience Cult & Its Ghosts

“Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing… How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter!… Writing letters, however, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment that enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to abolish ghosts as much as possible and to achieve natural communication, the peace of souls, they have invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it is no longer any good, these are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has discovered the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we shall perish.”

The cage was never forced on us; it was sold softly, with smiles and seductive ease. We didn’t just accept convenience; we actively chased it. Every tiny friction was labeled a market opportunity to optimize, every hesitation a flaw. Ambiguity felt painful, so we demanded certainty. We let notifications save us from awkward silences with ourselves. The market, a lover always happy to please, delivered everything instantly: food, fashion, news. Even outrage became optimized for frictionless consumption. Each click smoothed away another rough edge of reality, until life flattened into smooth, shapeless goop.

The trouble with goop: it struggles to become anything other than goop.

This isn’t about doomscrolling at 3 AM. It’s about an operating system we’ve willingly installed in our collective consciousness. We prize convenience above complexity and curation over genuine engagement. Algorithms shield us from discomfort by filtering reality into a tidy, confirmatory feed. Gurus and experts package up simplistic narratives for messy problems. Our very communications have been conquered by “therapy speak” and “PR training” b/c we’ve decided being inoffensive is more important is than letting the world know how twisted we all are.

The price of this exchange is loneliness — deep, structural, and epidemic. In order to present ourselves as inoffensive products/brands, we must saw off all the distortions that make us individuals. We mourn our transition from a messy symbol to a clean symbol. The constant connection without friction paradoxically deepens isolation, since it increases both the number of times we have to do this and the number of people whom we must cater to. The fast, friction-free setup never gives us a second to pause, to step back and wonder whether what we’re doing is really worth it.

It’s no surprise that we resonate so strongly with the story of Gregor Samsa being turned into a giant bug. The story feels so real despite the absurd premise because of how viscerally it communicates Samsa’s alienation. As a bug, Samsa is there, in front of his family, but he has completely lost his ability to communicate with them. He has to deal with the horrifying reality that his loved ones no longer see him, even as they perceive his exterior constantly. He is alone, even as he’s around others.

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”

This holding back is the ultimate seduction — it involves no effort, no pain, just an infinite indulgence in avoiding the world’s rough edges. But precisely because it demands nothing of you, no exhausting wrestling with God, it leaves you emptied. Devoured from within, stripped of agency, suffering the peculiar agony of inaction.

Eventually, what appears before you in this state of curated tranquility is not the world itself, but its shadow-a hollow facsimile, easy to grasp but impossible to truly possess. This is the inevitable end result of a world that worships convenience over all else. A world where the biggest concern is to minimize discomfort repeatedly, even as we find new ways to be unsatisfied.

Kafka felt deeply what most of us still only vaguely sense: a world devoted entirely to convenience is a world that quietly robs us of meaning. This frictionless life isn’t merely empty- it’s designed to keep us comfortably passive, perpetually waiting for fulfillment that never arrives.

But there is another, darker cost. When we surrender our discomforts, we also surrender control. Every decision we delegate to convenience doesn’t disappear; it shifts into the hands of opaque systems we barely understand. As Franzie K warned us clearly: the ghosts “won’t starve, but we shall perish.”

At this stage, we’ve explored how frictionless living hollows us out; next, it only makes sense to look outside. Let’s talk about the invisible systems now thriving on our outsourced agency.

Section 3: Invisible Hands & Quiet Power

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested one fine morning. He had hardly opened his eyes when two men entered, dressed in dark suits, quiet, calm. ‘Who are you?’ Josef asked, confused but not yet frightened. ‘You rang?’ one man replied, looking at Josef with an air of indifferent expectation. ‘I didn’t ring,’ Josef said. The men exchanged patient glances, as if they’d heard the denial before, from countless other rooms, in countless other apartments. ‘You didn’t have to,’ said the other, stepping forward. ‘We always come when we’re expected.’”

It might have begun with convenience, but it doesn’t end there. The ease we chase hasn’t just reshaped us into passive consumers; it’s quietly transferred our agency to systems hidden just beyond view. At each point, we happily surrendered — 

1. The effort of discovery

2. The burden of choice

3. The unique learning from the clusterfucks of human error (both ours and other people’s)

We wholeheartedly gave away our demons, but as we did, we failed to notice how our power silently slipped through our fingers. We failed to notice how our power and autonomy slipped through our fingers and into the eager, invisible hands of entities we can barely perceive, let alone hold accountable.

We gave away the pain of having to leave our homes in favor of getting food delivered to us. And with it, we missed the opportunity to really get to know the restaurants around us, and the people running/visiting them. We traded the potential bad conversation or 20 minutes of silence in the public transit for the comfortable engagement of our earphones. At every stage, we prioritized convenience and safety over the risk of building/engaging with a community, and then wondered why making friends as an adult was so hard.

This is bad at an individual level, but catastrophic when applied at a system-wide scale.

Suddenly, we’re forced to deal with automated, no-feedback rejections for our job applications, all b/c it would be too inefficient for a company to have the decency to treat our applications like they have value. Companies trap us in a bizzare loop of complex policies. Need to reach out to them for support? Talk to an automated customer service bot that cannot guide you at all (Con Edison has taken this to the next level- their bot tells you it will connect you with someone to help you, and then leaves you hanging permanently. This is truly revolutionary customer support).

These systems that we build to make processes more efficient, get turned against us- and we’re left grasping at straws, unable to do anything about it

“Amazon Uses Arsenal of AI Weapons Against Workers”. I’d probably have a much easier time raising funding to enable this crushing of workers rights then I would trying to protect them. Let that thought really sink in.

Suddenly, people’s lives become cogs in a system meant to be optimized around, even if this means risking these people to improve margins-

After a report on unethical mining by Amnesty International in 2016 and a Sky News dispatch in 2017, Apple suspended use of hand-mined cobalt. But, according to reporting in the New Yorker in 2021, “once the media attention died down the practice continued,” and the linked company, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, remained part of Apple’s supply chain.

People, our relationships, and even the very planet lose their intrinsic value, and we’re left only with how they feed the machine-

Source

These aren’t glitches; they’re features. The logic is simple: maximize efficiency, minimize friction, abstract the human cost. These systems aren’t malicious; they’re indifferent, programmed purely for optimization. Your well-being, your agency, your happiness? Not variables in their core equation.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

- “The Life of Mind”, Hannah Arendt

This cold, operational indifference is the air Kafka’s characters breathe. Josef K. wasn’t crushed by hatred, but by the impersonal grinding of a bureaucracy that didn’t even recognize him as fully human. My futile attempts to get Con Ed senpai to notice me weren’t rejected by a person, but by a flowchart. The system exists to perpetuate itself, efficiently processing ‘cases’ according to its own inscrutable rules.

“For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

And the powerlessness this creates? It’s uniquely demeaning. You can’t fight an algorithm or reason with a recorded message. There’s no clear enemy, just the quiet hum of the machine. Resistance feels absurd, exhausting. So we shrug, accept ‘that’s just how things are,’ mistaking surrender for pragmatism. Like K. circling the unreachable Castle, we learn to navigate our managed existence, not challenge it.

This constant negotiation with opaque, indifferent power doesn’t just frustrate; it fundamentally reshapes us. It trains passivity, erodes agency, and leaves us vulnerable to a world where we actively surrender our freedom

Slowly, steadily, but inevitably, the systems dismantle our power. What does living like this do to the self? What happens to attention, to thought, under the invisible machine’s shadow?

That’s what we will talk about next.

Section 4: Fragmented Selves & Scattered Attention

“I no longer know if I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.”

The external pressures described — the relentless demand for frictionless engagement, the quiet management by opaque systems — inevitably reshape the internal landscape. The primary casualty is coherence. Your attention, relentlessly harvested and fragmented by design, struggles to hold focus and define itself.

After all, we are built from attention. And when attention fractures, the self splinters too.

We learn to perform for unseen algorithmic audiences, curating personas, managing impressions, and widening the gap between the presented avatar and the internal reality. This constant self-monitoring, this performance for the machine, is exhausting and alienating. It leaves us feeling, like Kafka’s narrators often do, fundamentally misunderstood, adrift, struggling to bridge the gap between inner life and outer expression.

“Depression — which often culminates in burnout — follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears itself out in a rat race it runs against itself.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

Han describes the individual exhaustion; Kafka shows us what happens when an entire society shares this exhaustion. The ultimate outcome? A population less capable of sustained focus, critical thought, or collective resistance. Fragmented selves are easier to manage, nudge, and control. To borrow from my GOAT, fragmented selves are less capable of sticking to their guns, to find “the ideas by which they are willing to live and die.” All they can do is passionlessly whimper-

“Let other complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy… I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”

-Fun fact, this is one of the passages that made Kierkegaard my favorite writer

Recognizing this internal siege is the first step. The next is asking if, and how, we can push back- not just against the external systems, but against the fragmentation they breed within us. How do we reclaim focus and rebuild a coherent self in the face of the machine? Kafka, beyond diagnosis, offers clues.

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

Section 5: Becoming Friction

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

Kafka didn’t just show us the cage; he showed us where the bars are thin. He offers no magic keys, just the crucial advantage of understanding the layout. The path out isn’t about revolution; it’s about perception and deliberate action.

His work suggests how to operate within this reality:

• Stop playing the system’s game for its approval. Josef K.’s tragedy was believing the Court should make sense. It doesn’t. Accept the absurdity, find your own meaning elsewhere. Why bend over backwards to accommodate something indifferent to us?

• Keep asking questions. Even when answers are evasive or nonsensical, the act of questioning, of refusing to simply accept the black box, preserves our agency. Persistence itself is a form of resistance against induced apathy.

• Build elsewhere. If the mainstream systems offer hollow rewards, we must invest our energy in what’s real — genuine relationships, skills built for their own sake, communities based on shared understanding, not just shared feeds. Create value outside the machine’s logic. Ultimately, it’s on us to shape a world that meets our values.

This isn’t about winning some final battle against the bureaucracy. Freedom is something we must struggle for every moment. It’s about showing up daily, about engaging with the system instead of being swept by it. The absurd may never make sense, but in fully embracing its existence and choosing life despite it, we reclaim the power to find ourselves amidst friction, one moment at a time.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Source. If there’s anyone that touches Kierkegaard for me, it would be Camus. Unfortunately, I lack the fashion sense to resonate with Camus to the same degree as I do with Kierkegaard.

Thank you for being here, and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Would you still love me if I were a bug?

Dev <3

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